Brent Fisk

Day Laborers at Judy’s Diner, Slaughters, Kentucky

Heavy August rains
keep the men from their roofs. They abandon
hammers and nail guns for a few sweet
hours. The waitress drowns
them in tea and chatter, brings platters
of brown-fried potatoes.

Twitchy, fibrous arms push
spilled sugar to the floor. Listen to the cracking way
their necks unkink, scabbed hands rubbing
at the faded ink of forearms, the fissures of a cheek.

I know the squalid quarter mile they walk
back to motel shacks with sour towels and sheets,
black-spotted mirrors clinging to the walls,
lights left burning behind thick curtains.

One old timer stubs out a cigarette, growls
of a friend who slipped from a gabled Victorian
and adorned an ornate fence until the firemen cut him free.
He swears he lives still down in Alabama
and soaks in tattered summer hours mucking for catfish
in mud-banked tributaries.

I look at the wash of the sky, a tepid yellow.
The streetlamps pop to life. I head home
to an empty bed, leave the light
on over the kitchen sink. Cicadae wind their wings,
overlays the tap’s incessant drip. I think of the roofers
trying to sleep, dim mirrors reflecting dingy
rooms, small beds crawling with vacant dreams.

Author Bio

Brent Fisk’s poetry has appeared in Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, New York Quarterly and Prairie Schooner. He has received five Pushcart nominations and won honorable mention in Boulevard’s Emerging Poets contest.