the way my boss says “yes”/”thank you ma’am” when i make a miniscule mistake–its like a mother tired of her kid’s bullshit

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i wrote down a new team member’s name but forgot her number because i hate numbers

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I forgot the lockbox because money makes me queasy 

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I forgot my phone script because talking lights are a inferno in my heart 

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a full workday today, where i can remember and forget these miniature mistakes, just as long as toilet paper streaming from one resident’s leg 

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i saw one of the heads of the nurses put the thermometer on her like spritzing perfume 

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A memory: The guy who came in to see his mother d reminisced about the last time he saw his mother behaving “like herself”

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Our communications system has got a upgrade 

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Ocean Vuong said “time is a mother” & I thought about how time slows when my mother decides to treat me like a client

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Joke thesis topic: why poets say “ejaculation”

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running my hand through my undercut gives me gender euphoria 

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The pictures of young Allen Ginsberg give me gender envy

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An argument between residents ends with one person passing my desk and saying “give me strength”, which inevitably shifts towards someone treated less than a pet, or pets in general, i do not know

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Mandatory hand sanitizer spurts over peoples hands like semen 

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Medical masks muddied by miasma

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*rufus sewell in “the marvelous miss maisel” voice* “FUCK Burroughs”

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Feral: like mother, like daughter

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a vision fragment whispered through layers of cloth: “you know who you are, oliver”--the formal name above ollie “you don’t know shit about me except what day i was born.” i respond. Is this my Blake vision?

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7-11 cigarettes

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relief slow to come 

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 Yellow-shirted man with a yellow smoothie 

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Three residents in covid isolation

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We’re short two concierges for COVID related reasons 

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Two years into a pandemic, & yet staff members can’t wear masks properly when caring for the elderly, a vulnerable population. my rage could topple this whole fucking place. 

                                             (add it to the list)

Overheard at the nurse’s station: mrs d’s room has run out of kn95 masks. 

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Overheard at the nurse’s station: the second floor gets as hot as something approximating hell in the summer months  

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Overheard at the nurse’s station: “I have to take your temperature, ok?”

                                                  (add it to the list)

“you can go [redacted]” my boss says, using my work name. I stop pounding my keys in the way that nonverbally signifies creation, a little bummed out that i couldn’t finish this poem. 

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i walked out to the fifties music i’d publicly jammed to, where love is binaristic. 

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& i asked my father for a pen 

But not before finishing this poem on the bumpy back roads of PA.

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