AMAZON

by Donna Katzin

On Friday [April 1, Christian Smalls] won the first successful unionization effort at any Amazon warehouse in the United States, one of the most significant labor victories in a generation. The company’s response to his tiny initial protest may haunt it for years to come. —The New York Times, April 2, 2022. Photo: Members of the new union celebrated in Brooklyn on Friday night. Credit: Eduardo Munoz Avarez/Associated Press

At the fulfillment center in Staten Island,      

every day a marathon, she logs 30 miles

in 12 hours on the warehouse floor,

wearing worn-out shoes she cannot afford to replace,

picking, packing boxes on dollies and hand trucks

before she clocks out.

Jeff Bezos, back from outer space,

could not finish one of her shifts.

 

Beneath fluorescent lights that never sleep,

during precious seconds between packages,

when her mind fights to focus,

she thinks of little ones

she left before breakfast,

not knowing whether she would

make it home to feed them dinner

or kiss them goodnight.

 

Computers track how fast she picks and packs

on the human conveyor belt,                               

evaluate her by algorithm,

feed back seconds per task,

pieces per minute, numbers to hit,           

speed up without notice or reason,

threaten to dismiss her                    

for missing her target rates.

 

Knees buckle, back rebels,                       

wrists and elbows numb, cramp.          

Stress takes its inner toll,   

presses veins and arteries,                                        

hangs heavy on her heart.

She reports to Amcare,                                  

is given an aspirin,                                           

sent back to the floor.                                       

 

But quietly, between shifts, 

as summer sweats and winter gnaws her weary bones,

she joins coworkers, shares indignities and injuries

by telephone and text, Twitter and Instagram,

in parking lots, food pantries and pews,

dares to tiptoe to a meeting,

whispers the word

union.

 

Donna Katzin is the founding and previous executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

by Devon Balwit

There are so many ghosts in our machines—their locations so hidden, their methods so ingenious, their motives so inscrutable—that not to feel haunted is not to be awake.  —Walter Kirn, The Atlantic, November 2015

                                                                                                         
We dish dirt over drinks—husbands, work,
yearnings—the room so crowded I yell

to be heard, but still wish our phones
elsewhere, mics disabled, wish everyone’s

locked away, apps always asking
for locations, each talking to the other

in a digital chorus, strands in an unseen web,
vibrating. When the photos in my feed

echo, the upflung arms of child mirrored
in an abstract painting, or when memes

ripple outwards, themes kaleidoscoped
myriad, this is no accident,

the fancy of my poetic nature. Like a
kook in a backwoods cabin, I mutter

about the eye in the sky, but know
my needle port already inserted,

perhaps now running saline, but
at any time opiates or annihilation.

Each keystroke resonates elsewhere,
saved in cold storage by the NSA

in Utah or somewhere in Russia, fodder
for the clever, data points in the on-going

experiment. We’ve been turned inside out,
pockets filched of coin. A single finger

can undo us, and, like any with a knife
pressed so intimately, we obey.

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.