Butcher
30 yearsin the slaughterhouse
assembly line
30-55 cattle an hour
moving at an uninterrupted rate
hit over head with sledgehammer until
1950 then bullets were used
skinned steer
pulling 200 pound hides
off each carcass
cleaned it
cut cow in two
carried away
buckets full of guts
pressure to get job done
at certain pace
strictly observed
breaks 15 min am 10 min pm
half hour lunch
optimum no. 400 a day
bosses worked over
them pushing
first chest pain 1975
condition not improving
in 1976 hospitalized x7
final diagnosis: congestive heart
failure resulting in expiration
this fall
flesh unto flesh
(he was Catholic)
and there’s more than one way
to skin a cat
Math Class
Figure at the minimumI steer every two minutes
30 steers an hour
pulling 200-pound hides off each
48,000 pounds of hide off each day
240,000 pounds of hide a week
12 million pounds of hides a year
Working over 30 years
That’s 360 million pounds of a year
One guy
Two hands
The Shapes Of Minnie Evans
Her room’s a white square.Her bed’s a white rectangle.
Her dialysis silver cylinders, loops.
Her brown face a pained oval.
Her smile a red semicircle.
Round the circle of her poised family
Round the doctors’ rounds outside the room, mum.
Round were her buckets in endless hotels
Of cylindrical mops, deep square carts;
Round the disinfecting bubbles in buckets,
Hexagonal the bubbles’ carbon tetrachloride
(They showed her an organic chemistry book)
That formed and deformed her cancerous kidneys.
Round is her body under the fresh sheets;
Round the dark red bottle under her bed.
Yet what shape forms in the eyes of her son
Who stares at the 9pm harvest moon?
What shape her daughter fluffing her pillows?
What shape her goodnight-to-her-grandchildren voice:
“Be good. You all come back and see me soon now.”
Intake
Elderly manSilvery hair
Modest blue serge suit
Leans forward anxiously
Holding his left arm with care
He has severe arthritis
And the Symphony told him
Consider retirement
At 61 he only knows
The violin
The Musician’s Union referred him
Here he wants to hear
Possibilities and options
Of job retraining
He’s willing to work
His handshake’s gentle, full
Of fingers, like lonely iron
His smile’s warm and waiting
Like the soft curious scrutiny
Of an unsure bluebird
Printer’s Helper
As printer-proof reader daily exposureTo one or more of the following substances:
Lampblack, paper dust, resins, benzene, talcums,
Other ink fumes indigenous to field
Talcum powders daily used to dry proofs
Constant condition of poor ventilation
Open pots of lead melting, paper dust
Constantly in air stuck to clothing
Presence of resins increased dust amounts
“Everything was covered with it – from machines
To employees to the final product
Everything that had to do with the company.”
Current diagnosis: cancer: throat, left lung.
The Ballad of El Dorado Town
It started out a sleepy cattle townwith a waterhole in the middle of Main Street
until that fateful day when Arlen Brown
found a silver nugget at his feet
Chorus
Morgan Mines and Silver brought progress to the town
money to burn, new schools to learn,
and the railroad coming ‘round
the town shone brightly as we dug day and nightly
in beautiful El Dorado town
Sandy sold his farm, so did Mike and Zeke
Banker Dan says eleven farms were sold within the week
Bought by an Eastern man with a gold watch chain
Morgan from Chicago was his name
Oh they sank shafts so fast and struck up timbers too
Some folks wondered would it last and would it do
Asking Morgan, “Think them logs will hold?”
He nodded dreaming past them, “Where there’s silver, there’s often gold…”
Chorus
It happened quick like the flick of a candle wick
One twilight an explosion shook the depths;
Mine Seven timber’s gave a hundred men a grave
Laying down beneath the shining silver
Women ran from doors and screamed from windows
Wondering which one was a widow,
Waiting for the cage with their man to rise
Their twilight hearts a-pouring from their eyes
Now Morgan gently spoke to the bereaved
“I’d give the world had these men been saved,
Then he ordered up the coffins and the wreaths
And placed a silver nugget on each grave.
El Dorado Silver brought progress to the town
Money to burn, new schools to learn and the railroad comin’ round
The town shone brightly and we dug day and nightly
In beautiful El Dorado town.
The Work Poets (And Now For A Brief Non-Commercial)
I do not understandWhy they are not in most anthologies
Rukeyser, McGrath, Patchen, Fearing,
Replansky, Levertov, LeSuer,
Sterling A. Brown, Frank Marshall Davis,
John Beecher, and many new ones – Tillie Olsen,
Janice Mirikitani, Pedro Pietri, Benjamin Sáenz
What did they do to achieve
Such glaring invisibility?
Ernie Brill writes fiction and poetry about everyday people, and worked a variety of jobs in hospitals, as a drug counsellor in NYC, and as a high school teacher in inner-city schools in Massachusetts. His collection of stories, “I Looked Over Jordan and Other Stories” (South End Press) explores race and class among hospital workers. The actress Ruby Dee purchased, adapted, and performed the story, “Crazy Hattie Enters Ice Age” for her and her husband’s PBS TV series “With Ruby and Ossie.” Brill won a New York State Council For The Arts Fiction Grant. He received his BA and MA in English from San Francisco State College. Brill has published widely fiction, poetry and essays in the US and Canada, including the chapbook Project Kids (Ice Floe Press, 1993), River Styx, Other Voices, Z, U. of Minnesota, etc.). Favorite writers include Virginia Woolf, Richard Wright, Mahmoud Darwish, Hyseoon Kim, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, Pedro Pietri, Pablo Neruda.
Art: Industrial Orange — a Chemical Spill, a visual poem by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2023. Twitter: @frede_kenter, IG: @r.f.k.vispocityshuffle. Robert Frede Kenter is the publisher/EIC of Ice Floe Press, a widely published writer & visual artist living in Toronto, Canada.
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