It Was Already Dangerous

Working the 2–12 shift Driving home in the shiny dark

under the sleepless moon Curling his car around

suburban back roads Almost every day, pushing

drowsily his nice-enough-to-not-get-pulled-over SUV

Iced coffee sugared and milked into cake It was

already dangerous, diabetic as he is, for him to be

smoking all these cigarettes in the empty parking lot,

laughing and missing all these meals, even

while working the 2–12 a.m. shift at the high-end grocery

where the cured meats have their own specified domain

Hanging hocks of pork sliced thin by a woman

in starched whites and a paper hat The grocery

where you build your own six-pack and also where

my dad manages young undereducated smokers

in the business of facing groceries as they come

out of the box You probably haven’t wondered

whose hands make known the difference between

scented and unscented garbage bags, which hands

attend the 200-plus flavors of tea in aisle three

of your local You probably pass, un-asking,

by the perfected symmetry of toothpastes

and soaps neatly packed, straight-backed like soldiers

But it’s my dad, working the near-night shift,

stacking organic frozen pizzas in the cooler, label out

so you don’t mistake your vegan for your four-cheese

He is a connoisseur of cabbage, a kale-fluffing man

who knows each condiment by its color-coded brand

And it was already laborious, throwing box after box

off a forklift, hauling pallets of pesto and pasta sauce

It was already heavy but now also all the extra loads

of alcohol, ammonia, bleach, dual action disinfectant

wipes & toilet paper all the near night, canned meats

and hard cheese and frozen everything He’s already 63,

the ideal vintage for an otherwise indiscriminate virus

which lives for days maybe on hard surfaces like

linoleum grocery floors or metal grocery racks or

aluminum soup cans or lipstick-stained wine glasses

haphazardly left on shelves all over his high-end market

by tipsy white women who don’t believe in crisis

until it hits their homes It was already hard not to bring

his work home But now it’s more dangerous,

this already thankless and unseen and ignorable work

It was too much even before all this impatience,

all this insistence, even before all this aggressive fear

made him miserable, visible, vulnerable, essential