Flush Left | Andrew K. Peterson | 01 14 23

Work Song
after Gina Myers

All rest my powers defy.
—John Donne

Summer falls in false terminus:     labor 
abandons austere measure. Watch a film about sharks 
and monoliths devouring an ocean tourist by tourist. 
Work Songs we cover every day until effort’s reassigned

or the feather rudders yesterday’s Facetime in the park. 
Cicada’s hurdy-gurdy (my powers deify), but I didn’t see 
a dragonfly to lessen the decay or store my body’s rest until 
the sweat dries and the sea-carved salt from our backs 
carries back to the reef what Rihanna knows:
 
repeat a word enough & its spiral collapses, incomprehensible, a harvest at noisy dusk offering its unspent labor to the sky. The height of my fight syndrome: broken in drinking glasses, dusted magnets falling behind the fridge three tenements high. 

To do the work so I can rest the rest & make it 
(better? make good? or just: to make it). 
My worth is worth the effort: 

work work work work work  
work work work work work  
mmh mmh mmh mmh mmh  
wah wah wah wah wah 
ahhh wah wah wah wah wah waaah

A radiant hole I fall into 
until I labor, I in labor lie

—9.7.20 (Labor Day)

—Submitted on 09/26/2022

Andrew K. Peterson is the author of A blue nocturne notebook (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) and four other collections. In 2017 he was a co-organizer of the Boston Poetry Marathon. He lives near Boston.

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.

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