english

the ice worker sings

by Andreas Montoya

it didn’t matter to him that it was only seasonal

or that he had no choice but the graveyard shift;

a job in the ice plant in the hot fresno summer

was as close as he’d get to heaven.

or at least, this is what he thought.

he liked this job cause they let him alone.

here everyone wore ear plugs

and he was left in a room

by himself to stack blocks

of ice into rows of crystal perfection,

rows and rows, a huge army

of petrified water standing at attention

he found himself marching back and forth

singing songs he never knew he loved.

sometimes he would sing rock

or blues or even a classical tune

he’d heard on a bad radio commercial.

but, mostly, he would steal the beats

and put in his own words about life,

about love, about dying,

this is how he became a poet

parting ways with the sad ocean

of ordinary speech, he sang loud

and he liked it. No one ever told him

to shut up, or that he couldn’t carry a tune.

he enjoyed seeing song

spring from between his lips

in the white breath of the cold room.

he found he could forget everything

while he sang among the ice:

the house that kept shedding shingles,

the mad dogging eyes that followed him

to work, and his cowardice under the yellow street lamps

while he knelt on the road of potholes and gravel and dust

begging the moon to release him from his fear of everything.

but here he sang, and his army of ice

to him were warriors from tula, big

square warriors, sympathetic to the orders

of their general, which of course was him.

they laughed when he laughed

and cried when he cried.

only here, he never cried.

he didn’t have to.

at home, his mother slept with the windows open

in hope a breeze would finally blow.

at home, they didn’t have refrigeration.

at home, even the walls were hot.

on breaks he would sit outside

on the bench to smoke and drink coffee.

here he would pray for his mother,

pray for angels to come carrying machine-

guns and flamethrowers

to keep watch over her.

he would pray for wind

so that she, like him, might escape

the hell of fresno in the summer.

and when the break was over

he would go back to the ice

and give life to his army,

he would go back to the ice

and sing.