Jessica Ramer
To An Anonymous Road Worker Building Alligator Alley
Please Lord, I’ve been a good man. So if I get cottonmouth bit, or attacked by some of Oscar the Alligator’s brothers, and if I get to that Big Job in the Sky, oh, please, Lord, let it be on dry land. Amen!
—Graffito on an outhouse for the Alligator Alley road crew
He stood in swamp water up to the knee,
Muscles moving to the rhythm of space,
Toiling to build Alligator Alley.
Within that sawgrass curtain where wary
Denizens guarded their kingdom of space,
He stood in swamp water up to the knee.
Stripping off muck as his walkie-talkie
Chattered, he slogged through that bedlam of space
Toiling to build Alligator Alley.
Imprisoned by miles of sawgrass sea,
And yearning to flee this tedium of space,
He stood in swamp water up to the knee.
Far from home, he prayed, “Let my next job be
On dry land, not some two-bit thumb of space,
Toiling to build Alligator Alley.”
Nameless man, known only by his scrawled plea
In an outhouse squeezed on some crumb of space,
He stood in swamp water up to the knee
Toiling to build Alligator Alley
Jessica Ramer is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has appeared in South 85 and The Keats Letters Project. She was a summer 2017 resident at the Alderworks Alaska Writers & Artists Retreat.
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