Instructions for How to Get to Work on Time

by Amy Lerman

Watch yourself unplug the hair iron. Imprint the now-exposed socket holes, your hands ferrying the appliance across the Jack and Jill sink to rest on cool porcelain. Turn off hallway lights, smooth faux fur throws backing the coach and love seat, move toward the kitchen to refill cat chow and water bowls, then return to bathroom for verification. Walk to kitchen again, grab your keys/gum/an unzippered backpack, as you impersonate that kind of waiter who lines salads and piping hot, veal parmigiana plates on his arms, your coffee drops forming a mosaic along the gray utility room and concrete garage floors. Depress the garage door opener, reverse into morning glare past neighbors passing neighbors, stare down the intersection’s piercing red light, retrace your pre-exit steps, see yourself unplugging, and don’t think about fire. Drive a mile and a half, turn up the radio volume, shake your head in beat to “Seven Nation Army” then side to side, over and over, until your car yields to memory, a u-turn, your cats unmoving moments later when your key turns the front door’s lock.

6S

Amy Lerman, by way of Florida, Illinois, England, and Kansas, lives in the Arizona desert. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris, won the Jonathan Holden Contest, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passengers, Solstice, Slippery Elm, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and other publications.