Tammi Truax
Dinner Conversation with a Young Friend
It's Friday evening.
There’s no going back
until Monday morning.
We order tacos
and tasty drinks
and toast our time off.
But because
what we do
is who we are
our thoughts, our talk
drifts back to work.
Soon we compare
recent changes, ways in which
we might, maybe,
not die on the job.
Was it like this for the men
who built the first skyscrapers
tightroping high over honking cars?
Was it like this for miners
descending into the dark
breathing deep of death spores?
Did they gather together
after a long hard week
and discuss the efforts
made by their employers
to prevent their demise?
Maybe, maybe not.
We don’t know.
We’re just two women
who show up, every day
at an elementary school
and a Planned Parenthood office
smiling, behind glass
that may, or may not,
be bulletproof.
Tammi Truax, MEd, has worked as a teacher in a variety of settings from preschool to prison. She works daily as an elementary school librarian.
Her poetry has appeared in ten anthologies, including The Widows’ Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival with a foreword by Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg (Kent State University Press, 2014). A YA novel in verse, For to See the Elephant, (Piscataqua Press, 2019), was released in May and two volumes of poetry are forthcoming. Tammi recently signed with Oghma Creative Media for a two-book historical novel, the first due out in 2021. She is concurrently serving as the Maine Beat Poet Laureate and the Portsmouth (NH) Poet Laureate. More info can be found at WWW.tammitruax.com.