Sweatshop
The delivery boy,
awash with cold air, is rolling
The frozen bales.
The baster’s thread
emerges from the chalk track
and dips back in
like the dolphin he saw
in mid-Atlantic
on the passage over.
He tacks the suit
Keeping things together
until the finisher
unpicks his stitches. With hands
heavy as his twenty pound iron,
the presser steams the suit.
Soup and Yiddish are strong as sisal
while outside, in Lower East Side,
Americans say ” U boy” and are very tall.
To them the baster is like his suit.
a thread away
from going hungry or home.
Sally Michaelson is a full time conference interpreter in Brussels and mum to a son and daughter. She writes poetry in her spare time and has been published in Lighthouse.