Co-worker sonnet #16

Dave, the former soldier: a tacky queen

wearing his muscles, musk and torn jeans.

Larry was mellow, vain, friendly, simple.

He'd shot a man. Two years in jail.

Katrina: fine and small and smart and absent,

she nibbled clay the month she was pregnant.

Mean Tom with his midnight skin and swagger,

“Don't Ask Me For Shit” t-shirt, scar.

We found Pete on the floor tight and twitching.

Off his meds. He eventually went missing.

At twenty-five they made me the boss.

In two weeks I showed them I was clueless

and incompetent. Empty shelves and the shop a mess.

It was not the first job I had lost.

Aphasia on Injustice

Justice is blond, a coquette, a tease.
I was led on by the nose,
up a creek with only prattle
to clothe and make a man out of me.

And my father (none the wiser),
"Told you so!" he told me.
Are my accounts in her ears?

A burdened hand being worse, moreover,
than twins in a birchbark canoe...
I game a flaw: a flinch she
made in rhyme to save mine.

But that sidelong glance is the Devil's
hotspot. And like I'm hatched out
of a bell for her ready hearing, ever.