Why Men in Factories
Should Never Write Love Stories
Should Never Write Love Stories
Because their heroines would all look like Jennie in row three
her hair long and loose, yet somehow always falling in place
never getting caught in the presses or the screens of the furnaces.
She never looks dirty, though dust has fringed
her forehead, her cheeks, her fingers. Let’s face it.
Jennie makes shadows and dark laugh lines look good.
Because foreplay would be a quick nudge in the butt,
from a toolcart steered astray, a romantic rendezvous
would be sex in the old storage closet
among the rusty wrenches and broken tool carts
listening to deaf Jim in final inventory sing
Juice Newton’s Angel of the Morning.
Because they would still be high school quarterback heroes
dreaming of recruiters who never made their way
this far north, or wannabe rock stars with secondhand
guitars practicing late nights in their garages,
never wanting to believe they could end up
like their fathers and their grandfathers before.
Karen Weyant's poems have appeared in Slipstream, Phoebe, Nerve Cowboy, Paper Street, Labor and The Comstock Review and are forthcoming in Pennsylvania English and the minnesota review. She is a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. (KarenWeyant@mail.sunyjcc.edu)