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Devolution
The summer I turned eighteen I worked underground,
eight non-union hours spent scuffing a shopping cart of tools
through the long damp linking one laboratory to the next.
Damnedest thing I ever saw: a mutt bleary from sleep
wracked in the rictus of an eighty-year-old smoker’s cough.
I apprenticed for Rick, who weekends burned himself
electric red and drank a case of beer and who talked for hours
about devolution, learned from a rock band, and how
mankind was sliding back to slime. Sometimes he made sense
in those tunnels lined with hollow lockers, lab coats squishing by
in cheap Keds. They never told us what happened to the animals,
a lecture hall-sized room lined with cages, pink eyes rolling.
After Rick, there was Ned, who lasted a week, then Bob,
a Vietnam vet who drove a VW Bug and had been beautiful once
before his hair fell out and who looped his ball-peen under his belt
and strode about stoned, looking for a room. One morning
he went AWOL, then returned a week later and cried when Lou,
the boss, canned him. After my first day, Lou never came to site.
He was home dying of emphysema, or maybe it was a bum liver,
maybe he wasn’t dying at all, but by summer’s end all he was
was the static on a speaker phone doling out assignments and pleading,
Please, do whatever Mr. Liberaci tells you to. Which wasn’t much.
Liberaci’d already hired the next contractor, guys in buzz cuts
and the bullhorn tones of those who can afford the new houseboat.
By my last week everybody had quit but me. Lou didn’t call anymore.
A coat told me a subject had escaped, to keep an eye out,
the whole complex a maze of vents. It might show up anywhere:
frightened, hungry, drugged, who knew what it was capable of.
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Kurt Olsson’s work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and the Southern Review. He’s published two award-winning collections of poetry, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press) and What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press). A third collection, The Unnumbered Anniversaries, is due out later this year from Fernwood Press. He lives a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan where he’s pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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VW bug, photograph by Rebecca Korpita
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