RH2: RETAIL NEVER SLEEPS > POETRY
The gray light lifts over Broadway.
Blue-hued buildings impassive as sentinels,
exoskeletons always filled
from noon to noon, never empty,
are hushed on Sunday mornings.
Inside the store, the low hum
of electric lights, a rustle of fabric
on faceless mannequins
and quiet weekend murmurs
compose the morning’s softer symphony.
Soon, the streets will fill
the wooden cavern of the store.
A press of tourists, thwacked and snapping
hangers from which fashion’s latest slips
like napkins from children’s laps.
A cacophony of language
whose common denominator is the register.
Ca-ching and your change, sir.
Sunday mornings, we work
wordlessly beside the cleaning crew.
My friend, the small one, old man
in a boy’s body,
smiles at me in the elevator,
shakes his head and takes
my flat-stacked boxes.
His gallant hands, small and brown,
liver-spotted creases filled with dust;
He smiles a toothless smile and nods
like a broken wind-up doll.
On Sundays, he won’t let me do the work myself,
carting bags up, chuting trash.
He smiles and nods and shakes his hands
because we don’t speak each other’s language.
Lyz Pfister is a writer and translator living in Berlin. She is the editor-in-chief emeritus of SAND journal, as well as the author of the blog Eat Me. Drink Me. Before all that she worked her way from cash wrap to the men’s floor of that big Urban Outfitters on Broadway. She has discussed the best method of washing t-shirts with Dennis Quaid, gotten bigger jeans from the stockroom for Chris Brown, and is still really very good at folding clothes. Her original works and translations have appeared in untethered magazine, Janus Literary Review, STILL, Glean and Graft, The Bastille, Counter Service, and No Man’s Land, among others. She recently published her first collection of essays, Palate.