DAY LABOR

June through August when I was nineteen and twenty,

I unloaded boxcars on a siding along the Genesee

River. Stacks of bagged lime, silica sand,

and cement—each fifty-pounder grabbed by hand,

slid onto a knee, and horsed over to a pallet

outside the door where a forklift had dropped it.

The agency I worked for paired kids

like me with middle-aged men on the skids

who cashed and drank their paychecks at a bar

downstairs from the office. In the stale boxcar

air, sweat darkened their pants like pee,

dripping from cuffs, and smelling like cheap Chablis.

Bricks were the hardest to unload. With steel tongs,

we picked up ten at a time, but if the grip was wrong,

they crashed in a pile on and around your feet.

One older guy began to cry, loose bricks and the heat

that morning, making defeat, I think, feel complete.

Charles Weld’s poems have been collected in two chapbooks. A collection, Seringo, will be published later this year by Kelsay Books. He’s worked as an administrator for a non-profit agency that provides treatment for youth experiencing mental health challenges, and lives in upstate New York.