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.

A MEAT-PACKER'S SUPPLICATION

by Caprice Garvin

One African American worker at a Koch [meat processing] facility that had been targeted by Ice, spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. He alleged that while Koch had recently begun taking workers’ temperatures before shifts, they had also withheld details of any workers who contracted the virus. He claimed the company was now handing out surgical masks, but had forced workers to use them over two or three shifts. “They ain’t offering nobody no disability, no unemployment, no time off,” the worker said. “I just keep my hands washed up, my face covered up, my whole body covered, and I pray to myself and hope I don’t catch it. The truth is there’s a chance that everybody in [here] will catch it.” —“‘We're modern slaves': How meat plant workers became the new frontline in Covid-19 war,” The Guardian, May 2, 2020

Never can I return to that unholy shape.
Hunched. Hands slipping beneath skin of lamb.
The corpse lies like wax in the ear.

Our hands are deep in the unhearing.
Fingers tread the crushed skull’s drowning place,
fingers sifting cartilage, organs snaking through.

We do not choose our own placement—tissue,
cells, molecules lain elbow to elbow on the conveyor belt.
The meat comes through our fingers.

These warehouse walls impersonate mountains.
They keep out the mountains and the voice calling down.
I would give my life for a vulture,

to see the arc of one tracing the arc of my eye,
to see that faintest movement at the edge.
To know there is something farther.

I know what it is to hear the last stream crackling ice.
A toe goes in. A knee.
A tongue soaked numb.

I am flexible as the neck of the vulture bending down.
I pick apart this body so that my son may know
his own body whole.

The skinned eyelids watch the blood drain
from floors as clean as obedience.
I will not feed my son my suicide.

Caprice Garvin, a native New Mexican, currently resides in New Jersey. She studied in the Writing Division at Columbia University, where she was awarded The Woolrich Award for Excellence in Writing, and in the Writing Division at Sarah Lawrence College where she earned an M.F.A. in fiction. Most recently her work appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry. 

PANTOUM FOR THE ARTISTS

by Alejandro Escudé

A person with the Oakland Fire Department takes a photo of the artwork on the front of the "Ghost Ship" warehouse in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016. The Fruitvale district warehouse caught fire on Friday, Dec. 2, killing 36 people. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group via East Bay Times)

The artist dies in a house of fire, the exits unknown.
A wreck bastardized, a crow suspended from spokes.
Why was nothing done? Where has the fire begun?
Separated by the smoke, the artist gags and chokes.

A wreck bastardized, a crow suspended from spokes,
The city rumbling past, a bridge full of nothing-souls
Separated by the smoke, as the artist gags and chokes.
Coffee here, coffee there, cold nights like unlit coals.

The city huffing past, a bridge full of speeding souls,
But the artist seeks more, a hive of unpredictable acts
Sipping coffee here and there, on cold coal-less nights,
Squatting in the cheap happenstance haphazard tracts.

The artists seeks more, the unpredictable hive acts
In such a way that cannot serve the absconding rest
Squatting in the priciest prime premeditated tracts.
Every fire begins in disarray or in an empty chest.

And so, the artist will not serve the absconding rest
And there is nothing to be done. The fire has begun
In the city’s forsaken disarray, in the penurious chest.
Artists live in a house on fire, all the exits unknown.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE

by Howie Good

Genevieve Griesau sat at Chapel of the Chimes, an Oakland funeral home, after the Oakland warehouse fire that killed more than thirty people. Credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times, December 4, 2016

All it takes is that one guy asking,
“What if there is a fire?”
And now that room is on fire.

We will be here for days and days
to come. Give me some gloves.
I’ve got work shoes. I’m ready.


Howie Good is the recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his new collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.

UNACCOMPANIED MINORS

by Phyllis Wax

Detainees sleep in a holding cell at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville, Texas June 18, 2014.
--REUTERS/Eric Gay/Pool 

fifty thousand in less than a year
scarred, scared
exhausted
stomachs gnawing

to escape violence
there’s no hiding from at home,
in the neck between the Americas,
surviving the trek
through endless Mexico
and now

they sleep on a warehouse floor
in Nogales
sprawled in
the myriad positions
children sleep in—
snuggled to a sibling
arm or leg
overlapping
flopped supine, mouth agape—
detainees of a resistant state

The soft sighs of their breathing            
warm the cold cement they lie on

while lawmakers want to
send in the National Guard

Phyllis Wax muses on the news and politics from a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI.  She's been widely published, recently in The Widows' Handbook:  Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival from Kent State University Press.  When she's not writing you might find her escorting at a local women's clinic.