Portrait of the Artist in Purgatory

Birch Wiley

Between degrees, the poetry professor
managed a McDonald’s in West Texas
for five long years. He stank
of burnt oil and industrial soap,
as Octavia Butler must have, coming
home from the potato chip factory

where she inspected the chips for errors,
imperfections. Margot Robbie probably
smelled fine working at Subway, though her hands
were raw in winter from the washing
and washing and washing, the knuckles pinked
and painful. Joyce’s hands were careful,

had to be, feeding the slip of film
into a cinema projector’s organs,
watching acetate pass through hot
guts of the machine, dreading sparks. A friend,
an illustrator, remembers how beautiful
the muscles vining her forearms were

the winter she sold ice cream in Boston,
bent at the waist to pry massive chunks
of rocky road and strawberry and mint chip
from the bottom of vats, their waxed cardboard
walls frosted in ice. I bet Matthew
McConaughey was beautiful even

servicing chicken coops, shoveling straw,
scraping white shit from wood with a piece
of metal. I used to work in a five
and dime, sold packets of sunflower seeds,
screws, novelty tea pot covers, Choward’s
violet gum, upholstery needles.

Now I work in a library, which sounds
romantic and literary but mostly
I get to write these poems, though, and there
is the rest of life, in the time the boss

can’t buy, and the mind’s intimate cabinets
where work can’t follow. There’s the poet
professor who lives upstate now with his
beautiful wife and his beautiful child
and his beautiful poems. Imagine
his cheeks stripped of beard, hair disguised

under an oil-stained baseball cap.
Gray eyes stare out of the fishbowl
of that clean, well-lighted place. Years pass
on this side of the glass. He stares out
to where the light from the golden arches ends
and night’s brick wall rushes up to meet you.

‡‡

BIRCH WILEY is a transsexual writer living in New York. Their work can be found in Pleiades, Voicemail Poems, and Querencia Quarterly, among others. Their debut collection, Mythweaver, was published by new words {press}. You can learn more about them at birchwiley.com.