CHAIM MICHAELSON 1928
Stranded in your suit, Ellis Island
prods you through a pen
where vowels escape
from a jutting jaw
that gets smashed flat
by your incomprehension
no lice or scurvy
just a foreign name
so they stamp you Jim
on your entry visa.
FAME 1928
The girl in tatters
unfurls herself
over urchins posing
on sweatshop steps.
The photographer
from Time (an issue
about poverty
on Lower East Side)
promises to show them
but doesn’t come back.
Readers in armchairs
on Manhattan Broadway
can’t help shouting
That girl is cute !
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.
THE FINISHER
The finisher’s stitch streaks
over the white line
chalked by the baster
A racehorse
neck to neck
with a Singer machine
her own life
a hang of raw
neither cut nor tacked
searching for a pattern.
THE PRESSER
The twenty pound iron
has steamed
his fungiform hand
with vagaries,
black and white notes
stroked by slim fingers,
rose poised
between index and thumb-
Friday night flower
for a woman
with cool skin
like shade in summer.
THE BOSS AND HIS WIFE
The wife stirs all four seasons
in the thick of her soup
(a pinch of primrose,
summer hayfields, Odessa autumn
snow on steppes) her workers taste onions,
potatoes, carrots.
The boss can count but can’t write
the officer who laughed
when he put a cross at immigration
should see him now.
