Back to work and at last
the fireballs explode into gore
at last my fingers fit
again around the cube
of cardboard, at last
a customer is explaining
how smart they are
while they jam their card
into my mouth
at last I mop
the bathroom floor, say ‘excuse
me’ to whoever bangs in
at last, I pull the rope
of so many people’s hair
from the drain, the dripping braid
explodes into gore
the mist lays down into
the self I don’t know and
the many selves who put their
plans aside to sleep, again
dreaming words that
are a chain of gift-boxes
in their eternal packing
peanuts, damp clots of hair
the word of god, the angel
of revelation is the sound
a system makes telling me
to drive from here to
there or that the piecework
has been refreshed
w/deadlines and price per minute
at last I say
when is pay day, how much
do I get paid, the answer
explodes into gore
and when I wrote
fireballs, I meant the hope
of something immanent
that transforms the every
day instrumentalized
into a spectacle that
simulates a change
experienced so often
the line between the two
becomes like concrete filling
a baby pool, I mean
fireballs, at last as I step a shovel
into the dirt, this
landlord’s garden, a landscape
a bad and lonely view
and on the toilet sneak-read
a nature poem, a mineral pigment—
magnolia, thrush—over ashes
a continent, seedless and deep
ashes that fertilize nothing
but ashes, ashes that hold
the cool river of the mind
then sink it into ashes
and through the drifting
mist of ash, a conveyor line
full of ashes
notification: ashes
ashes clock out, to
clean the ashes from the
vinyl tile a bright
wheeled bucket of
ashes, and there the
transcriptionist is, let
the record read: ashes
not explode—ashes
not gore—ashes, not
italics—ashes, ashes
that’s the job:
touch the ashes
touch and touch
the ashes
Joe Hall
Joe Hall is a Buffalo-based writer and reading series curator. His five books of poetry include Fugue & Strike (2023) and Someone’s Utopia (2018). The Boston Globe: “Joe Hall’s poems move between a fist-pounding urgency, the fire and squelch of this moment of our endtime, and a vulnerability hushed and gentle as a nightgown on a laundry line.” Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at bars, squats, universities, and rivers. Postcolonial Studies, Poetry Daily, Fence Digital, Best Buds! Collective, terrain.org, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have all featured his writing. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers through Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center.