Poem a Day: 15

Tax Day

Oh, I remember that first paycheck, back in college,

Pittsburgh, when it was “the most livable city” in

the country, when minimum wage was 3.25 and I 

was just 20, and worked five or six hours a week 

for Elaine Powers Figure Salon, jumping on a podium, 

slapping my hard thighs, counting loud, crammed 

into a tight T and high cut half-leotard, shiny stockings 

and hot black legwarmers (the uniform I’d been obliged

to purchase before starting the job), my hair shorn 

on one side, the rest curled with chemicals, fashioned 

to fall with rakish insouciance over one mascara-

bleeding eye; when I whirled and twirled and sweat

and shouted to Prince and The Clash, then slalomed

back to campus through rush hour traffic on a creaky

old 10 speed (once Mom's), flying down and then

slogging up hills; when I debated the Cuban Missile

Crisis in class and went home to bang out angry

poems and papers on Chaucer, killing my typewriter;

when I missed my boyfriend, the one who'd flunked

himself out a year, so much that I took up with another;

when light fell into my parents' old bedroom (mine

now, like the bike) in the house I now hared with four

strangers with a kind of gray grace; when I filed my

first taxes, noting as I did that I made no real dent

in the American economy--that, in fact, according

to the charts, I didn't need to file because I'd made

nothing, or nearly so, and would be getting everything

back (a hundred bucks or so and change), all those

sweaty hours earned with hard labor and sore

muscles, to the driving disco beat, where women

worked after work and before dinner to make sure

they (like me) didn't take up too much space.

April 15 2014