Waste Management Facility, MadHat Press, 112 pp, 2025.
Misanthroptic
Waking. Somewhere in the neighborhood,
a switched-on whir, then the repeated whine of a saw,
till one day pulling on some pants and setting out
to find exact location. Not that far away,
a dead giveaway: BOB BLAIR FURNITURE REPAIR.
A folding garage door was raised, rolled back.
Blair emerged otherworldly in his cloud of sawdust,
but wheezing and sucking for air. Over his head,
centerfold pin ups in every garage door panel
were framed by black tape. They hovered like angels.
“Electrical,” Blair said, hacking and glancing up.
“No good for anything other than insulation.”
I probably looked confused.
He meant the tape— you wrapped it around exposed wires
or twisted connections. Uh-huh. I followed
Blair’s curled pine shavings blowing
across the concrete floor— the angel’s hair fallen out
the night before. What worried the angels?
Above all, Blair sweating about people who didn’t
take care of their furniture, so never addressed one thing.
Addressed? “What’s wrong with this world?”
Who took care of Blair?
I wanted to know. His hands
ran down the contours of the damaged armoire
dropped off the night before. Armoire, I thought.
Something to do with love, right? “Back again,”
Blair said, of that tall piece of furniture,
“for the umpteenth time. The same damn door
broken by the same kid who keeps swinging on it.
What’s wrong with people?” I try to forget
asking, “Is this how you spend all day?”
and then, how quickly he showed me his license
plates— uninterrupted years—
nailed edge-to-edge on the back wall. “Memories,”
Blair scoffed. “Memories are for cons, for cons
pressing plates. Cons? “They stamp all day
to keep down dreams of getting any time back,
as if next time around would be better.”
“Where,” I asked, “are they?” I meant memories.
“In prison,” Blair said. “Pay attention.”
Space Probes
Around this time last year, the Town Launch was stripped of families squid fishing. Before that, teams teemed, pulled dinners for the week, then left, the way it might have been centuries past. In this one, they straddled five-gallon paint buckets or faded, tilted cooling chests on crippled wheels to hold ice. Some proudly showed off jigs they bought, especially the long, thin elliptical types improved by luminescence, bright, futuristic LED lights evenly embedded along their sides, what attracted them, I thought, more than squid. Without thinking, I commented, “They look like space probes.” One teen casting, remarked, “Who?” His buddy was more excited to tell me jigs had pins, not barbs, which wasn’t a response to my gaffe or his buddy’s testiness, but a lead-up to advice he thought most important to share: no hook to set, so when squid stretched their mouths— “called beaks, like birds,” he said, “but they’re, how do you say, super? supper? gives? something like that”— right over the jig and gripped, you had to reel your reel real fast, before the squid knew what happened. Reel real fast. Who? Two days later, the town shut down the sprung-like-a-leak operation, also called a collective concern for our newfound stock’s depletion. “Necessary,” a resident standing dockside said, a few days later, now that it was safe for everyone, “but there’ll be more of them further on.” “What?!” I asked. No, he meant more squid farther up the coast. The bitter March wind has begun to ease. Today, I’ll test our harbor, push beyond the nested streets, the tight lanes and rows of heritage-protected fisherman homes one block back, in hopes the globes of my shoulders drop from my ears. It’s nothing about hearing, only a sign it’s warm enough to make straight for the open, then the Launch, and there, remove my gloves, a layer or two. But first, leave my cap on, not as disrespect for warmth or for progress like it once was, but is.
Waste Management Facility
The Works— Public Works—
was the prized summer job that kept us,
three juvenile delinquents, out of trouble.
There never was enough
work. We thought that a pretty good deal,
but it wasn’t alright for our two bosses, who,
before we came along, already had looking busy
working for them, but now they had to keep us looking
busy too, more work than they could handle. Often,
two hours before a work day ended,
the bosses ran out of ideas for busy work,
gave up and trucked us to the sewer plant,
better known as waste management facility,
because who would ever go there
to catch anyone loafing? And who cared, anyway,
as long as we were out of sight and off the streets,
all five of us? Look, our bosses knew
what they were doing and so did we.
As for feeling bad about being paid to
or about being removed from view
or about cheating taxpayers
or wrestling with the value
of a hard day’s work or complicity,
I’m sorry, none of those concerns surfaced.
But the few times I’ve been asked, What impact
does a summer like that have on our future?
I have gone back to the facility
on those days our bosses told us,
“You know what to do!” That was code
meaning the Water Quality Alarm had sounded,
so a fair chance the big boss would be by,
and he wouldn’t want to see us standing around
doing nothing. So time for my buddies and me to hustle,
clear the collection tank scaffolding,
where we liked to hang. Time to
plug our noses and take off to get by
the ever-expanding beds of backed-up
overflow, which once dried, we’d cut,
in the days ahead, into squares, then pitch
onto a struggling farmer’s flatbed,
who then used our baked good to produce
superior feed corn around the facility,
a break for him which hid us even better.
Our future? Finally, we arrived upwind
and hung out near the pile of rusted re-bar
left behind from the facility’s previous expansion,
hung out where the big boss, in the shiny, black SUV
coming our way, couldn’t see us—
the corn already too high— but we could see
the cloud of dust rising behind his dramatic entrance,
so confirmation he was to test release
for drinkability— always questionable
whether or not he did, if watched—
which meant pick up a piece of re-bar,
and still good for something, start swinging,
whomp the high grass as if after rats in it,
and holler, “Got one.” “There’s another.
Get it!” “D’ya get it?” “Nope. Wait,
there it is. There it goes.” And keep
chasing. Don’t look at each other,
and definitely, don’t look back.
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Scott Withiam has published two books of poems, Doors Out of the Underworld (MadHat Press) and Arson & Prophets (Ashland Poetry Press), and a chapbook (Desperate Acts & Deliveries, Two Rivers Review). A third book, Waste Management Facility, will be released by MadHat Press in 2025. His most recent poems and prose pieces can be found in Barrow Street, On the Seawall, Rattle, and Tampa Review. Poems are forthcoming in Diagram and Plume.
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