Fall 2019


The Blue Collar Review is a quarterly journal of poetry and prose published by Partisan Press. Our mission is to expand and promote
a progressive working class vision of culture that inspires us and that moves us forward as a class. The work presented is
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Poetry Samples from the Latest Issue

Work Well Done

There is something about hay
dust and chaff sweat-glued
to skin, that is sealed in my
memory with a bookmarker
in the volume of hard, hard work
so if I want to find the page,
I can. But wrestling bales when
I weighed a buck forty-five is
not a page I would turn back to,
except for the camaraderie
of working with my brother-in-law.
We were always battling
the fickle Oklahoma weather,
hundreds of bales in the field
the air pregnant with rain. But
what a satisfying feeling to glance
over your shoulder at the clean field
when you were driving back with
the last load. Then pull in the barn
as the patter of rain pinged on the metal
roof. What a victory. Hay in the barn,
showers to start another cutting, and
six weeks before you'd have to do it
all again.

       Mark Weinrich


Eight Feet

You say. Seasonal work's a bitch
come February. Come March,
you correct, with too much rain.

From the windshield dangles
a spider. You've got a nest?
I ask. Within every eight feet,
you reply, there's a spider;
there may well be. These things
you learn on the nature show

in the winter months you wait
for unemployment checks.

We sit in the cabin, unbuckled,
complain about jobs. .

       Christopher Alex Chablé


Leaving

Every day, she enters this small room to
care for you whose eyes are closed as by
some interior thread, whose words must be
now imagined sounds, the cant of silence.

You are her daughter. She bathes you,
turns you, though she fears that her love
whirlpools slowly to nothing. She knows
your flagging, ragged breath, your flesh

like dough that refuses to rise.
Her faith is a practical melancholy
that works in this lair of despair despite
the fetor of a dying body. Paintings hang

on each wall: birds in a low shrub;
ripened fruit; shafts and bars in yellow
and white; the horizon past dusk.
Leaving, she straightens their frames.

       P.M.F. Johnson


Entropy

Today, paying bills
is my primary "must"
bleeding toil-stained money
In God We Trust
though the bills keep coming
and the car won't start
and the punch clock ticks
away lives in its steely heart
and the days race by
like a dream forgot
until all that we know
has crumbled to dust.

      Al Markowitz


Food Heat Medicine

There are people who go
to Las Vegas slap their money
on the table down for chips
slap it down slap down
suckered along by a trickle
of winnings that always
ride the wheel to hell
the flames on the back of the cards
you didn't need to live
through this

There are people who opt out
of reason    shoot drugs
into the veins of lives none of us
care to treasure

But most of us play
Food    Heat    Medicine

I knew this tonight when my daughter
fixed us supper
knowing it would be
meatless spaghetti again eaten
in a nearly heatless house –
that as we chewed
our fronts to the tiny glowing
cube our backs to the
icy walls we would chew
in time to the tuneless
inexorable music of the electric meter

I wake up cold cold
or was it hot hot with fear
or was it the medicine
I bought instead of the heat
so little heat it would buy
or was it the guilt
the guilt of needing, neediness
powerlessness

A lot of us are losing
at the food heat medicine game

Maybe when the government tells
us this is a boom
we'll scream them down
we'll say not without
food    heat    medicine
Are we going back to the caves
short and brutal
ruthless red in tooth and claw
I'm old so it's coming at a bad time for me
the old need food, heat, and medicine
as do the new
and those in between who
take care of us
get tired of
going to Las Vegas
throwing granny up on the
roulette wheel or
pitching the babies like dice . . .

Food       heat       medicine
Food       heat       medicine
Food       heat       medicine

Take it to the streets
I'll be there soon anyway
but not for long

      Mary Franke


America

again,
your vigor tests my soul.
are you the beautiful lady or
the vampire that sucks my blood or
are you both, for
i am the son of the son of the jew
who ran for his life & now am i best
to be prepared to run again?
i look at the black man, the latino man,
the middle-eastern man, the gay man &
we ask ourselves should we
be boarding up our window for
the coming of rocks?
will there be shooting in the night?
fires in the sky? kristalnacht all
over america?
my life has begun its slow ebb.
in the distance i hear children chanting.
i listen carefully for their words.

      Normal


Naiveté
Even I thought this. And I am not a man easily fooled.
                              -- Leonard Gomez Vides

It is about time the US elected
a Black president, I thought,
in 2008. Naively thinking
that race mattered to those
running the show, that we were
being presented with a choice
for a change. Naively thinking
that anyone could achieve
a corporate party's nomination
without first demonstrating
that they had slipped into
the stringed suit that is controlled
from above. Naively thinking
that he has slipped one over
on them, that they had fallen
for some slight of hand
some wizardry he possessed
over the higher powers I know exist.

Fifty-nine I was, and fooled
for the last time. Eight years
later and thinking, it is about time
the US elected a woman president,
I was not so naive. Lyrics from a song
by the Who were my daily earworm.

       Ed Werstein


Mourning News

Every morning, at my desk,
my computer feeds the news:
childish politics, senseless violence,
twisted logic, outright lies.

As a hurricane's storm surge
erodes beach sand out to sea
torrents of vile rhetoric
undermine American integrity.
Deceitful politics strain to divide
that once declared indivisible.

As cherished beliefs
are shredded, trampled,
I seethe. I grieve
in powerless despair,
becoming an angry stranger
lost in his own homeland.

       John Rowland


The Architecture of Greed

In the wet dreams of a once great superpower last week
Child-soldiers waged a top-secret war by classified leaks
As Daddy Warbucks & the Big Boys played hide-n-seek.

Trigger-happy cops took aim in the Land of Last Hurrahs
Fast-tracking a sadistic culture of wingnuts, shock & awe,
As demolition-artists engineered another brutal coup d'etat.

Freedom was dumbed-down in the spin of disinformation,
Propaganda bombast & enhanced interrogation,
Into a vast klepto-plutocracy of mass incarceration.

Prisons-for-profit & slavery helped streamline the bottom line
In slick reality program broadcast live in tabloid time,
Leaving only collateral damage & crocodile tears behind.

By-products of a twilight empire of artificial hearts
Built methodical thrill-killing into a chilling fine-tuned art --
An atrocity machine for overkill with all its moving parts.

Tomorrow became a toxic dump, a no-fly free-fire zone,
The annihilation of non-white races by robot-wars & drones
And bragging rights for alpha-males with low testosterone.

From the air-conditioned House of Cards, guarded by spooks & trolls
The ruling class collects its loopholes, late fees & tax-free tolls
Using the latest techniques of systematic mind-control.

Homeless in the ghost-dance of the dying American Dream,
Blood-money talked in a hushed act, with murder behind the scenes,
Courtesy of the revolving door & ballooning pyramid scheme.

Useful idiot ideologues & demagogue tycoons
Celebrating mercenary goon-squads in smoke-filled back rooms
Polished their golden toilet seats & heirloom silver spoons.

Sold down polluted rivers of high-octane nonchalance
They basked in their bastions of fine-print, comfortably ensconced,
Looting Fort Knox & saluting the rock-ribbed knee-jerk response

As We, the People, were fleeced again, lied to & hung out to dry
Mouthing the motto "Devil take the hindmost & Never say die!"
Taking a knee at the anthem to Mom & Apple Pie.

       E.P. Fisher


Late Night at the Diner

I walk among you, yes --
with discredited hopes in the Time of the Financiers,
my dialectical hat
full of holes and the black rain down will rain.

I eat among you, elbow to elbow,
in the greasy spoons,
shoulders hunched over our bowls,
ask you to pass the salt, and you do,
good stranger in the old coat,
who might yet be my friend.

As I mop up my soppins with yesterday's bread,
you tell me how bad things are
and getting worse,
because I look like a man who has slept in his shoes
in a friendless city,
a man who knows a thing or three about the pace
of unemployment lines --
the kind of guy you could trust
out of earshot of the Boss
But what can one person do,
considering that a door is the size of a grave
standing on a question?
Should you argue with your empty hand
and harvest fire?
Build a voice, perhaps,
more molehill than mountain?
Learn to grow old poor, adopted by silence
and eating the class names for failure?

The waitress fills our cups again,
knows we know she eavesdrops
on our counter talk.
Not one alone, climbing the walls,
mumbling inside his number and his name,
but many together, the whole hoi polloi of us.

I could say that word,
more curse than conjuration in these toxic times --
Revolution --
and watch you pull your eyes and elbows in
across lines more black and white
than any I could reach or write across.

But some risks are worth taking,
as this is worth having --
a unity I will believe in past mockery,
and my sympathy will not be revised
into pages where the sun is buried beneath myth.
A dream hardens into speech,
and beyond this residue of action

there is us, talking over empty plates,
callin' 'em as we see 'em,
my voice added to yours, your voice to mine,
ours to the waitress's, who takes the pencil
from behind her ear and joins us on her break,
until all the bus stop diners
and holes-in-the-wall are ablaze with talk

traveling at the sound of light,
in little bars people are raising their hands
and yelling out, "Hey! Set 'em up, Joe!
And pour one for yourself.
We've got some talking to do down here!"

Until the time for talk is done.

       Robert Edwards


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