Amy Thatcher
I Hate My Job at the Public Library
I may as well be a sonic ream of NO RUNNING IN THE LIBRARY wallpaper.
I dream of throwing a fit, fucking the place up. So much of this job is shit, sweetened
by my higher-self smile—teeth bleached for a world-wide welcome: Give me your tempest-
tantrums and public masturbation. Your bedbugs and broken laptops, your bowel movements
and teenage prison prodigies. I’d rather work with an ax, bludgeon the bookbags off
the after-school kids, splattering their it-doesn’t-matter math.
Like physics, I could go on indefinitely.
At home, my bills thank me for being a good mother.
I wonder if I’ll live long enough to pay off the house,
still young and plump with fixed interest.
I drink and smoke because why not, you only have
one life, and I’m glad mine isn't in Texas.
It’s easy to be grateful when you compare misery.
The way I see it, the grass isn’t
always greener, sometimes it’s quicksand,
and only a storytime full of screaming
toddlers can save you.
Driving to work, I cried across three zip-codes
thinking of what my mother would say,
chopping the air with a veiny hand:
Be glad you have a job. She had two,
and barely a pot to piss in,
something I’ll never forget,
having to flush with a bucket
from the tub. At the end of the day
is the end of the day, cracking
the fuck up.
Samson and Delilah
Death’s a slick bitch,
throws a punch then watches,
with studied nonchalance,
an old woman whirl
like a mechanical ballerina,
before splitting her head
over a manhole cover.
Death lives with a wrongness
any psychic can see
coming a mile away.
Her palms have grown
lines long enough for two lives:
The one drinking a gayly named
20 dollar cocktail called
Hornswoggled Strongman
and the one with corseted
lungs and a weak constitution.
Death’s hoping for a comeback,
to throw on the 10,000-mile
bridal train that swept
through Europe on the backs
of rats. To outmatch love
like Hedy Lamar
in Samson and Delilah, when
Samson lays waste to the pagan temple.
Death doesn’t play around
with her dualities.
She is, herself, another.
Poem in Which Burt Reynolds Takes Me to Chemotherapy
Burt Reynolds is blonde
and I am hairless.
Burt doesn’t read much, but that’s OK.
I like my men dumb, my world flat.
Who needs a scenic incline
when you’ve got someone reliable
stroking your shoulder for four hours
in an infusion room? I’m still waiting
to kick cancer’s ass, wrestle its wrist
to the table, pitiful
as a mispronunciation. Burt says
things could be worse—
Jesus could have been a teen
with oppositional defiant disorder,
sulking behind a slammed door.
Moses could have tripped and burned
in the bush. The Red Sea could have
collapsed, sending the staff of my IV
reeling past the elevators,
through the drowsy nurses’ station.
So much pink! You’d think
breast cancer was the guest of dishonor
at a gender reveal party—
a real bonny lass.
Amy Thatcher is a native Philadelphian where she works as a public librarian. Her poems have appeared in Guesthouse, Bear Review, Rhino, Rust+Moth, SWWIM, Crab Creek Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Shore, The Journal, Denver Quarterly and are forthcoming in Cherry Tree and Harbor Review.
