Second Annual Brigid in Cyberspace (Silent) Poetry Reading

Last year, I missed it, but when I noticed that today is the Second Annual Brigid in Cyberspace (Silent) Poetry Reading, I was determined to take part.

At first, I thought I would choose something by Anne Sexton, as she's always been a favorite of mine, but I was stymied by choice. I love the book Without by Donald Hall, but kept crying as I read it, and I didn't want to choose something so sad. Then I remembered this poem, and how it makes me feel optimistic, hopeful, happy, nostalgic, and something like sadness, but not that exactly.

Assembler
by Debra Allbery

My twentieth summer I got a job in Door Locks
at the Ford plant where my father has worked
for twenty years. Five in the morning
we'd stand tired in the glare and old heat
of the kitchen, my father fiddling with
the radio dial, looking for a clear station.

There aren't any women in my department.
At first the men would ask me to lift
what I couldn't, would speed up the turntable,
juggling the greasy washers and bolts,
winking at each other, grinning at me.
In the break room they would buy me coffee,
study my check to see if I got shorted.
They were glad I was in school and told me
to finish, they said I'd never regret it.
Once I got loaned to Air Conditioners,
worked three days in a special enclosure,
quiet and cool and my hands stayed clean.
Out the window I could see Door Locks,
the men taking salt pills, 110 degrees.

In rest rooms there were women sleeping
on orange vinyl couches, oven timers ticking
next to their heads.

At lunch I'd take the long walk to my father.
I'd see him from a distance, wearing safety glasses
like mine, and earphones, bright slivers of brass
in his hair--him standing alone in strange sulfur light
amidst machines the size of small buildings.
Every twenty minutes he worked a tumbler,
in between he read from his grocery bag of paperbacks.
He would pour us coffee from a hidden pot,
toast sandwiches on a furnace. We sat
on crates, shouting a few things and laughing
over the roar and banging of presses.

Mostly I remember the back-to-back heat waves,
coffee in paper cups that said Safety First,
my father and I hurrying away from the time clocks,
proud of each other. And my last day, moving shy past
their Good Lucks, out into 5:00, shading my eyes.