Portside

Hanging Onto Our Selves

By Fred Voss

We fill egg trays with 30 identical beryllium copper electrical connectors each

stack the trays

until they reach for the machine shop ceiling

we make hundreds

thousands hundreds of thousands of identical beryllium copper electrical connectors

until they come out our ears

and we dream them in midnight dreams and seem to eat them

for breakfast but we

are each so different Merlin

sleeps in his van he parks in the Home Depot parking lot all week

after driving from the high desert over the mountains 90 miles

to work

and sings opera

at his machine until he cries then smiles like some crazy clown saint doing a comical waltz

around his machine as his fingers cut to shreds by the sharp copper connectors drip

stinking cutting oil

Ishmael

keeps swordfish swords propped against his workbench by his toolbox with the pictures

of the thousand pound swordfish he once pulled from the sea

says the sea

is his woman and talks of how he wants to cruise her with a harpoon in his fist a swordfisherman

once again as soon as he can and we worry

Ishmael will cut off his fingers reaching for electrical connectors next to razor-sharp cutters

as his eyes glaze over

and beautiful swordfish leap from the sea as he hurls the harpoon

in his mind

those shiny red-brown beryllium copper electrical connectors stack

toward the factory ceiling

each identical to within thousandth-of-an-inch blueprint dimensions

as we

stare across our machines at each other and try to be as different

as we can

Carl

still furious at the 10 years he spent caged in prison for killing a man

with his bare hands on a downtown L.A. street corner staring

at the tin walls as his machine runs until his eyes fill with tears

that never fall

as he balls his fists up and turns those tears into punches

at the air

and me

a million miles away in my mind running as far as I can from the numbing boredom

of a million identical electrical connectors to seize

these poems out of thin air

and set myself free.

Fred Voss has been a machinist for 40 years. He won the 2016 Joe Hill Labor Poetry Award. His latest poetry book, Hammers and Hearts of the Gods, was selected a Book of the Year 2009 by The Morning Star (U.K) and is available on Amazon. In 2015 he published his novel, Making America Strong.