Pink Slip

This is my winter, the unemployment of spring.
As breakfast grows cold, toast soggy with jam,
the years come closer like resurrecting the ash 

of burned letters or the way my body articulates 
the form of past wounds: lost fingertip and an arm 
like a jerry-rigged hinge, knees of broken glass. 

Each day in the city, faces blur in mastic frames 
of passing windows, eyes locking mine, letting go; 
how on the bus the last riders talk of going 

home to see what’s cooking with their lovers.
Then enter the weight of real or perceived failures
as hours inch across my room until the sun slips 

from cat-crooked blinds, and I walk out to drown
in the strange honey of the evening crowd,
spun from my orbit like an orphaned grain.

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GARY SLOBODA lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Big Other, Posit, Thrush, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Word for/ Word.

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