Susan Kolon
Scenes from a Career
Part 1
Unsafe work environment
The security guard in the hotel parking
garage is there for the Indy 500 race car
I drive down the East Coast in 2003,
stopping each morning to pick
up men from automotive magazines who
promise to flatter and fawn in our
PR bid to sell replicas after its final race
at the track. No one concerned about my safety nor
ask how a twenty-something woman feels
safe (would it be the same today?) strapped in
the passenger seat for three days,
cheering the virtues of blind spot monitoring, soft
to-the-touch surfaces, automatic high beams
(perhaps, but hitched to the allure of advancement).
I was a mere throttle body, regulating
air to the engine so the driver
could accelerate and
there was no rough idling.
Work-related stress
Back from lunch, three years in,
a note left on my keyboard, WHERE
ARE YOU??!! A scribble penned
by my manager and laden
with animosity. My boundaries
seized, I sink into a QWERTY
perimeter of cubicle prison.
Toxic behavior
I start a side hustle at the gym - 70s Rock & Sweat.
The tall one asks, Is this class for old people?
In harmonious inquiry, a reckless band of super jocks
at the threshold, their once-over for fresh hints
of dormancy on overdrive. Convinced to stay;
millennials love anything retro, I play Don’t Fear
the Reaper for the weights portion of the program.
A microaggression wielded with serene pretense
and I am rewarded by their teardrops of labor,
which blink toward me like a bright, white light.
Accident at work
Bush Maze Moments:
a revolving reel of wild mammals
plays on the seatback screen.
Caged in a fuselage of fuel and surging
wings to my destination: Manhattan,
the Magic Kingdom of corporate animals,
where I will learn how to run.
Bobcat soon-to-be cheetah,
whose urban jungle
will become a thicket of ash,
welcomes me on
September 10, 2001.
A spotless landing
in the company of
an unworldly wilderness,
thrown to the lions untamed.
Hostile environment
The empress of copywriters,
her pen – a red sword of superior
rule– tells women, only women
and always younger, that our copy
is second-rate. She wields her
success as proof, ‘as seen in’ magazines
now defunct. I am asked, what
is the wholeness of her humanity? Ha,
precise derision reads the synopsis.
Fair to say her instruction, reflective
of her own climb, is laddered in
the conviction that mastery be brutal.
She divines cruelty for grievances
of grammar and it fells me, my scraps
of ambition a put-into-words pipedream.
Susan Kolon is a Chicago-based health educator and poet. “Jealousy drove me to make amends via poetry. The first time, when my younger sister raced by me on her birthday bicycle, I turned my wheel into hers and she fell into oncoming traffic. I wrote a poem about it, and it worked; my parents forgave me.” She is currently at work on her first book of poems.