Issue 43.2

Labor

by Kevin O鈥機onnor

 
The pay is horrendous, and the humongous
chunk of time it will take of your life is daunting,

but you can fix coffee and croissants for the proletariat,
swap tires for the elderly, sling fries to the disenchanted, 

even wax wizard-like in the halls of academe
on constructs, abstractions. Inside you鈥檒l wither like Job, 

soar like Noah, with blackened wings, 
pale with knowledge, railing against phantoms,

serpents, lassitude, the hazardous bourgeois infatuation
with smoke and mirrors, insensate.

You鈥檒l be a component, consciousness,
the existential nausea required to lug leaky trash,

scrape paint from bones, make friends
with ghosts. You鈥檒l bloom, fatten on goat cheese

and mead, while elders wilt in self-negation,
conjoined by doubt, summoning the invisible hand

of a dead market, Prospero lying in an open grave,
though he won鈥檛 appear any more than relief,

the taste of water in the underworld, roiling sea of flame,
lure of the daring, the assured, and the dispossessed.

About the Author

Kevin J.B. O鈥機onnor received his MFA from Old Dominion University and an MA in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English at University of Kentucky. He lives in Lexington, KY.