Before The Storm

Most of my writing attention has recently been devoted to a screenplay I am working on, which I considered posting an excerpt of on here but then rethought it better not to. Here’s something else, though–a poem about my old job.

Before the Storm

We are throwing a baseball from
opposing corners of Richmond and Cortland,
outside of Richard Yates elementary, me and
Nate Cornrub (the name is a long story).
It is early October, Nate’s wearing a
sandwich board sign we made earlier
this afternoon that says “Last Day to
Sign Up!” in English and Spanish on
the front, a crude drawing of a hurricane
on the back. Parents are hovering,
standing by entrances to the school, talking
in warm and low voices. They ignore us.
We have been here since September,
pitching our after school program
over the others, handing out flyers and
answering questions, always in our
yellow shirts, and they know us by now,
and so we nod, say hello, don’t
even bother with the push. We dick around,
play baseball, talk about movies. After Nate
gets tired he comes over to my side
and we sit on the curb. Next week
we will be working down in Berwyn,
then door-to-door in the suburbs.
This is an end to our time here. We
don’t know now that we will soon lose
our jobs, that the Department of Education
will put a freeze on secondary educational
spending, meaning in the city of Chicago
almost all after-school programs will
shut down or be seriously undercut,
that we will not be staying on
as tutors through the spring, and that
most of these kids we have convinced
to sign on with us, to keep them off the
streets until their parents or guardians
come home—the same streets where
one morning, arriving here close to 8 AM,
at the same intersection we now are seated,
we came to three men beating a fourth,
kicking and punching at him as he lay on
the concrete, one of them striking him
with a board with a nail stuck in it,
the three of them running off at the
sight of us, to leave the bloody
crumpled mess on the sidewalk, which
we learned later that though we called
an ambulance the man was dead before
we even got there—most of these kids
will not get placed in the program.
Things will get bad, but maybe
because of our naivety, we have pride
now—the four of us underlings here—
me, Nate, Alora, Ben—all working a job
most people wouldn’t touch, begging for
more hours, going door-to-door in the rain,
knowing that the people we talk to
are uniformly bothered by us. When
the freeze comes we will go our
separate ways, and in a month
two of us will be back in with our parents,
I will spend most of the winter
weathering unemployment and depression,
and Ben, well, he probably made it out alright.
This will all come later, anyways. For now
we are in good spirits, unified by our
stature as unemployable, on the cusp
of failure. We sit here, tired,
and a couple of white flannel-clad
ride by on fixed gears, and Nate jokes
“that’s gentrification for you,”
and when the parents disperse
we walk slowly home.

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