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Virgil Suarez

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No Work Poem #2

the night it snowed in Madrid,
my father came home early
from work, and my mother
knew there was something
wrong by the way he took off
his shoes and threw them down,
like dead chickens whose neck
he’d wrung, and he stood up
and took off his shirt where
bruises, cobalt blue, showed
on one shoulder, arms,
and on his chest, my mother
asked what happened to him,
and he wrapped his arms
around her and held her,
whispering something
in her ear, then my mother
asked me to go play in my
room, and I didn’t want to go,
kept staring at the deep-dark
of those bruises, like fists
gone ripe there on his white
chest. Later, I learned that day
my father had gotten into a fight
with his boss, another Cuban
man at the Colgate plant where
they were janitors, and my father
let the man have it and in doing
so lost his job, and since then
I’ve had my own close calls
at work, all the shitty jobs,
and the fantasy that I will wrestle
with my boss, a man I can crush
under my weight, just to hear
him call out for me to spare
his life, the way an elephant
might sit on your car one day,
and try as you may, he’s not
moving, and I think of my father,
the way he put his shoes down,
and that’s how I want to put
my own life down, quick, final.

 

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