Winner, Slipstream Press Chapbook Award, 1998
Slipstream
Press
P.O. Box 2071
Niagara Falls, NY 14301
$6.00; 45 pages
Plane Operator, Furniture Mill, Slips on the Job
It was a cold Fall afternoon
in that deadly stretch
between break and quitting
when Joe didn't let go of a board
in time
and the planer, huge, screaming metal behemoth,
grabbed his arm
tried to pull it right out of its socket.
Joe screamed
not nearly as loud as the machine
but screamed like a man
and pulled back
terrified there'd be nothing in his sleeve
but blood.
What did come back was naked arm--
the planer got his sleeve instead.
When the fear and adrenalin
subsided a bit
he started to feel the pain and realized
the arm the machine gave back
wasn't his own arm any more.
The scream of the plane had pierced the bone
and for two years
Joe couldn't sleep
could hardly eat
couldn't work
could only hurt and hurt.
He began to dream of going to the shop
and feeding his hand
into the planer
letting the machine have what it had almost taken,
giving it up as a sacrifice
to be freed
from the pain
that ate him up from the inside.
Twice he went to his truck
started the engine,
went down the familiar road to the mill
but he drove on instead.
The third time he took a gun.
He fired twenty rounds before
the foreman stopped him.
The newspaper reported the damage:
dents and chipped paint.
That was all.