Belt 7 by Joshua Mehigan

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend December 2, 2014   Belt 7   Joshua Mehigan

They stepped down into cool continual wind   that smelled like wet rocks but caressed their faces. The pit was dark. But even when the eye adjusted there was nothing there to see. All day the white hat stayed above somewhere. There was no better place to spend July. There was no happier thing that they could be. They propped their shovels on the black earth wall  and squatted on the curved necks, gingerly.   Then, leaning back, their heads below the strands of bulbs like tarnished Christmas decorations,  they plotted Friday night, or dogged each other, or rested their bare heads on their bare hands; played twenty questions, shared their blackjack systems, or walked down deeper to relieve their bladders; stamped chevrons in the dirt beneath their heels; or weighed retirement and related matters; or, hour after hour, cursed their job.            Copyright © 2014 by Joshua Mehigan. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “My current book contains a few poems set in a cement plant, but ‘Belt 7’ doesn’t appear with them because it wasn’t done in time and I thought I already had enough cement-plant poems in that book. The cement plant in these poems is based on a real one where my father worked for many years, and where I worked briefly, sometimes on Belt 7 (which my father says was called Belt 3 in real life).” —Joshua Mehigan   Joshua Mehigan is the author of Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). He works as an English teacher at the College of Staten Island and as a workshop instructor for Brooklyn Poets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Most Recent Book by Mehigan   Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) "Engines Within the Throne" by Cathy Park Hong "Vocation" by Sandra Beasley "Odd Jobs" by Jericho Brown Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038