A Week in April with Harper | Advice to Job Seekers

a week in april with harper

every night dog sitting I dream goblins
emerge toes first from drains and from between floorboards
appearing as bright grins and pairs of glinting eyes
to enact petty mischiefs all throughout

the pasture of sleep
shallow blue-gray grass and
like the ocean
throwing waves

and Harper, who has lost her brother, Eli
her tiny little bod curled up by me on the bed
because I do not speak dog I
read my grief onto her doggy itinerary of

cascading sighs, a certain angle of elfish ears
I impose a slight meaning
onto the track she trots through the grass
soon they will be reclaimed back by half

I think her feelings are too fast for her body sometimes
when after work she greets me teeth bared and leaping
I see it as exaltation, expression of joy or maybe
release, relief

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advice to job seekers

plenty of hands shake, in conference rooms, in the zoom
put on my resume how I used to chisel gum off the bottom of theater seats
and how now fifteen years on my shoes still smell of salt and
how ten years on I can look down from the overpass
and when I blur my eyes
the snowflakes look like stars

I’m going to a galaxy where there are better drinks
when the boss warned of automation I should have known it was me
who would become the machine
now I don’t need lunch breaks I don’t excrete waste I don’t
sleep or wail or scroll
and on layoff day

I’ll fold up like a murphy bed
and I won’t even dream

John Piccirillo is a higher ed worker in Denver, CO. He is interested in transit, labor organizing, and neo-luddism.