01.29
When we look up at stars on break
we see only stars behind
the exhaled Milky Way
of Bobby’s Golden Virginia,
ways to navigate shift patterns,
nothing seismic or anything approaching
truth; for us stars mean only night shift,
insanity of depth,
the slow individual seconds
during which the dotted starlight
doesn’t burn fast enough.
05.29
It was wee Gail’s seventieth birthday
last week and she has a special
seat to sit on all shift
and her hands are old at the task,
old at working the tricks that come
with having laboured
in the same place for so long
and she’s making light work
of sifting defective ring washers
from those within tolerance and
her bench could be a grand piano,
her patch of floor a stage,
and, in another life, it is.
In plastic, a book-length poem cycle by the Northern…