Labor
by Kevin O鈥機onnor
The pay is horrendous, and the humongous chunk of time it will take of your life is daunting, but you can fix coffee and croissants for the proletariat, swap tires for the elderly, sling fries to the disenchanted, even wax wizard-like in the halls of academe on constructs, abstractions. Inside you鈥檒l wither like Job, soar like Noah, with blackened wings, pale with knowledge, railing against phantoms, serpents, lassitude, the hazardous bourgeois infatuation with smoke and mirrors, insensate. You鈥檒l be a component, consciousness, the existential nausea required to lug leaky trash, scrape paint from bones, make friends with ghosts. You鈥檒l bloom, fatten on goat cheese and mead, while elders wilt in self-negation, conjoined by doubt, summoning the invisible hand of a dead market, Prospero lying in an open grave, though he won鈥檛 appear any more than relief, the taste of water in the underworld, roiling sea of flame, lure of the daring, the assured, and the dispossessed.
Kevin J.B. O鈥機onnor received his MFA from Old Dominion University and an MA in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English at University of Kentucky. He lives in Lexington, KY.