Bird in the Hand Alley
Five
o'clock's yellow slant
on office walls again —
time to close the day's rationalizations
and leave. I check my totals:
petty cash, rifled again.
Calculator tape, almost gone.
And Dave, my boss,
whose business is failing,
his life a series of depletions,
has slapped on his patchouli and left.
Here
in Suite 310, things are
either used up or never on time,
like the black bananas
in the fridge or these bills
past due — think
I'm becoming
comfortable with failure.
Beyond
the window, jacaranda
lose their leaves while peacocks
pretend to be free, loose again
from some backyard cage,
dragging their lush burden
of feathers through alley trash.
Their loud cries penetrate
the glass, sad, unyielding,
as if hope and loss were one sound,
like the question I should ask
Dave about my job but won’t —
no one around
brave enough to answer.
Sally Molini's work has appeared in or is forthcoming in LIT, 32
Poems,
Beloit Poetry Journal, The MacGuffin, Hanging Loose, and elsewhere.
A graduate of Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers, she is
currently working on a first book. She lives in Nebraska.