Post-work pool time by Morgan Boyer
I lied on the towel
from the National Museum
of Crime & Punishment
my calves aching to
even move let alone bend
from 7.5 hours of:
Do you have a Kuhn’s card?
Remember to tell them their total
before handing them their receipt
Like the vengeful Goddess
of Tide Pod coupons is going to strike
me down if I don’t tell them that they spent $74.56 on a 4th of July BBQ before
handing them a piece of paper
only for them to crumble up & throw away
like a disgruntled third-grader angry
at his 7/20 weekly spelling test score.
As I watched an ant crawl amongst the
shrill of children pissing in the Dormont
pool, my mom reclines in one of the chairs
with her smartphone, scanning through
her Facebook feed, talking about whatever stupid thing Trump said or did.
My energy to deal with that orange blowfish in a suit
had been drained from me by having to look
up the produce numbers for avocados and
leaving half-opened Yahoo bars in my smock
in order to hide it from the manager’s camera.
I yearn for the days when I had the energy to care about things that I couldn’t touch.
september 24th, 2020Morgan Boyer is the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and graduate of Carlow University. Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Oyez Review, Poydras Review, Pennsylvania English, and Voices from the Attic.