by Sharon Lee Snow
Where my dad worked nights, pushing
brooms at the GM plant. The white collars
weren’t there to disrupt the nighttime rhythm,
the thrum of a graveyard
shift at work. Tough men, bolting
bumpers into place. My dad taped notes
to his broom, studied Circuits, Thermodynamics,
Calculus as the dust grew exponentially
beneath bristles, a slide rule key to more
than you’d think. Dangerous men
alone at night.
But they were alright.
They were alright, under their fluorescent sun,
scented by dirt, sweat, the sweet smell
of weed, a handwritten sign: Corner of Los Animales
hung on the side of a metal cage. A warning
or a joke. Maybe it was life.
You didn’t ask.
My dad, twenty years old, fighting against sleep
as he drove home—a wife, two little kids,
creeping in at 4 a.m. In four hours, back
on campus at Youngstown State, wandering
the halls like other young students, the ones—
—Who didn’t have a mother in the South Side of
Youngstown, neighborhood crumbling around her,
A violent deconstruction brick by brick,
family by family. Houses you wouldn’t sell. Blocks that
Government grants would erase like they never
lived at all.
—The ones who didn’t have a wife they never saw, the
little boy needing pants, the girl needing boots,
the need to pull up and out and away, scrape off the rust,
shake off the smell of sulfur, the tragic beauty of springtime,
the ones who didn’t come from Youngstown.
Sharon Lee Snow earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida in Tampa, where she served as a fiction editor of Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art. Her award-winning work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been published in South 85 Journal, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Gulf Stream Magazine, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, and other magazines. A Midwesterner from Youngstown, Ohio, she currently lives in Tampa, FL where she is working on a short story collection and a collection of poems about Youngstown and her recent move from California.