by Janice Keough
I’m the billing queen for a tech company
or I was until they ‘just had to let me go.’
So the young guy working on his Masters
is now the billing king, ‘he’s fabulous and young.’
When I started this job with a new boss
(wife of the big-boss, made-manager,
her new group to run, a new title spun)
she thought I was ‘fabulous and fun.’
I had a plastic box in my drawer,
a box from some forgotten chore,
I’d pull staples from sales orders before
billing, a nice pile of silver parentheses.
Then sweep them into a box going nowhere
to skitter around their molded walls.
how many spent staples would fit?
I never counted them all.
66 months of staples unbent from their job
66 months of papers pitched into boxes
66 months of bills and payment calls and
66 months of fabulous growth and praise.
66 months of worry at end-of-month
66 months of ‘great job, how do you do it?’
66 months of no-time-off allowed
3 days before the end thru 3 days into the new.
Now the box is full of gray silver strands
joined into a massive sameness.
now I’ve joined the mass of unemployed,
a parenthesis tossed from the box.
Janice Keough has published in the RI Writer’s Circle 2008 Anthology. Last January, the Bay Area Poets Coalition awarded her 1st Honorable Mention for the 64-count poem, "Lemon Life". She wrote "Billing Queen" after her layoff last Thursday from a Warwick, RI technology company.
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