Into You Like A Train

On the right: The factory gate at Dupont Chamber Works in Deepwater, NJ, which my Dad passed through for 35 years.     That Essence Rare   I have always bristled under the yoke of wage work. I always understood it as an imbalance of power. Someone is making money off of my labor. I don’t know if it came from seeing my Dad work, understanding that “work weren’t no joy”. I think that is from the Clash, “The Equalizer” on Sandinista!. That song kinda spelled it out. [lyrics] I learned a lot from The Clash. “The men at the factory are old and cunning/You don’t owe nothin’, so boy get running” (“Clampdown”). Maybe that’s where I first grasped the concept, but I knew my Dad hated work, too. He was a creative person who read books, liked art and music, and was often doing art, whether it was political cartoons or pen and ink drawings. But he had a family to support. Sometimes all that anger and frustration would build up. Sometimes I was on the receiving end. I always wanted my ...

  Reclamation One after another, the losses just kept piling up. Only recently did I realize how much I’ve lost. Looking through old photos: my ex-girlfriend, Heather, standing on the shore of the Black River on our first camping trip together; Otis, a black cat looking above the rim of a white claw foot bathtub; Loca, the calico, stretched out on the windowsill, another cat she’d been watching on a fence in the distance; my Dad sitting on a park bench in a camo t-shirt and sweat-stained straw cowboy hat at Fort Mont; a smiling Grandpop Dunham with a cross tie clip, proudly clutching the New Testament; an old black and white photo of Grandmom Stolar beaming, kneeling beside a horsie rocker with her sons, my Dad and Uncle John; My Uncle John’s portrait in his school teacher tie and jacket, I can see the sadness in his eyes; and Eli, my three-legged cat napping on my lap, my air cast ankle in the background. They’re all gone. Those sentient beings that I loved and once touched are go...

He didn't make a sound  when he hit the dirty floor, 'cause there was no one there to hear him anymore. Under the kitchen table: cobwebs and balls of dust. There's that  antique jackknife,  That you thought you lost. And then your heart stopped. It was weary and broken. All the loved ones lost, The "I Love you”s  left unspoken. And the ones you cared about, have all passed away, The children you once played with, now live so far away. The sink is filled with dirty dishes, Moldy food in the ‘fridge. A grease spattered wall, Is this really all there is? The end of every month, Seven hundred in the red. No money for food or beer Is it any wonder that you're dead. I wouldn't view the body Something I couldn’t do. That's not the way  I wanted to remember you. A camo shirt and sweat  stained hat, Sitting at a park bench, Down at Fort Mott. Ashes in the water, pale clouds billo...

It’s about nine in the morning when she hears him clomping up the wooden steps and unto the back porch. “About time!”, she thinks to herself as she places the cup of Nescafe on the formica table top. She turns toward the shaky aluminum screen door just as he enters, carrying his silver lunch box in one hand, a brown-bagged six pack in the other. He responds to her bland “good morning” with one of his own as he walks over to the refrigerator. He sets his lunch box (with it’s hand painted iron cross and his work nick-name “Mad Dog”) on the top, pulls the six-pack noisily from the bag, and puts it in the fridge, while pulling a can loose from the plastic rings that hold it together. He pulls the tab off the Reading Beer tall-boy, and takes a long much needed draw as he pulls out the chair and sits across from his wife. “How was work?”, she asks, without interest. “It was alright”, he responds. He takes another long draw off the tall-boy, savoring the cold wetness and a...

As I plodded up the back steps, I could already smell it through the screen door. My stomach churned. I knew what I was going to have to eat for dinner. It was my Dad’s day off before switching shifts at work, and he was making one of his favorite meals. As I opened the door, a steamy blast of putridness, the smell of tripe, from the steam loudly hissing out from the pressure cooker rattling the regulator. For those of you who don’t know, tripe is the muscle wall of a cow’s stomach. Disgusting, right? Spaghetti with tripe in tomato sauce. I felt nauseous as I climbed the stairs to my room to do my homework, but instead read Isaac Asimov’s Science-Fiction Magazine. Finally, the call came, “’S’eat!”, my Dad yelled, thinking that a clever contraction. Crap! I had to eat what was put in front of me, whether I liked it or not. Even if it was disgusting. My Stepmother would tell me that plate would stay on the table until I finished it. Didn’t matter how long. Even if it got mol...

Laurel Lake is in the pinelands of South Jersey, in Cumberland County, New Jersey, close to Millville, and beside the scenic Maurice River. The lake is man-made, as are all lakes in Southern New Jersey, usually created by damming for the purpose of running mills back in the early days. Originally, it was a summer resort area, but now, and when I lived there, it was more of a low-income housing area, summer cottages adapted for year round use by attaching trailers and adding small wood-frame rooms, garages, sheds and other simple structures. Commercial Township also allows trailers to be placed on lots that are not designated mobile-home parks. There are nice houses on the north side of the lake, but we lived in a green and white trailer on Dandelion Road near Doris Drive, on the southern, poorer side of  Laurel Lake. Still, there were cottages and trailers that served as summer retreats, which when vacant were frequently burglarized. I was guilty of this myself, breaking into...