Confronted with the dim lighting, dark wood, and the tangy, sweet scents of barbequed meat, Kaylee stomped her right foot twice, then, lips pursed, exhaled. Better Ribs BBQ had no signage directing DoorDash drivers where to pick up orders and she dreaded asking.
“Can I help you?” said the young woman at the hostess station.
“I’m…here…for…Door…Dash.”
The hostess tilted her head. “You drive a car?”
If Kaylee could speak normally, she would––every day, every time, every word—but she couldn’t. Kaylee swallowed. “Yes…I’m…a…Door…Dash…driver.”
Two other orders sat in the car with her husband, David, waiting to be delivered. Saturday evenings they made good money, got plenty of work in a concentrated area, picked up several purchases in a row, and then dropped them off one, two, three at addresses near each other.…
Tick. Tick. Tick. Kenny watched as the clock on the wall of his seventh grade classroom moved closer and closer to twelve, it seemed to taunt him with its slow, unending ticks. His foot had begun to shake uncontrollably in anticipation, smacking against the tile flooring like the applause of a crowd. In about five minutes, when both hands of the clock met at the very top, the teacher would call out Kenny’s name and he would have to go give a speech at the front of the room. The speech was on the history of Chicago, he had always loved the city, but he found himself dreading it now as the countdown drew closer to zero. He hadn’t really prepared for the speech, it’s not that he didn’t have time, his teacher gave him almost a month, its just that it got lost in the daily tangle of life until suddenly it was speech day and he had nothing.…
When he first showed me the crescent-shaped rash on his chest, right over his heart, I glanced at it from across the kitchen. My husband was fresh from the mid-summer garden, dripping fresh salty sweat on the floor. I knew better than to come too close, and there was always something. The cactus splinters in his hands, the twig in his eye, his darkened rotting toe. “Feel it!” He didn’t sound too desperate, so I said, “I’m not a doctor.”
That afternoon, I scooped cookie dough. My husband walked in from the garage and pulled off his damp tank top. Even though I’m near-sighted I could see the eruption, now a quarter moon, which covered his chest and protruded at least an inch. I bent down to examine its details, touched it tentatively.…
Good Girl and Other Yearnings by Isabelle Correa (Photo: Write Bloody Publishing)
Isabella Correa’s collection of poetry, Good Girl and Other Yearnings, carefully draws upon popular music and rhyme to interrogate the meaning of what it is to be a woman and a worker in the digital age. At the same time, sonorous lines and uncanny imagery explore tragedies of family relations.
For example, in my favorite poem of the collection, “interview with a dead girl,” the spiritual intersects with the mundane, as the speaker’s hair turns into a halo in the first stanza (“hair spooling into haloes”). Before work, eggs boil at breakfast in the next stanza, which have been overcooked as they “pop,” and a “sting of oil, that sustenance of speckled heat,” anoints the speaker’s arm.…
Jamie was determined to hide his anger. Bullies turned his anger against him. They made him look helpless and dumb to everybody on the school bus. Worse: they turned his joy against him too. Like that time when word got around that he was into dinosaurs and everybody started calling him Jamiesarus. Or when everybody found out he still watched Mr. Rogers after school and all the bad things that happened after that. And if Jamie ever got mad and made a fist, or answered back to defend himself in any way, the whole bus would turn against him like they always did. They never turned on the bullies or the bad guys; everybody always turned on him and made him feel weak and crazy too since he never did anything against anybody, and mostly tried to make himself as small as possible and to stay out of everybody’s way, and to mind his own business.…
Fortunately, the alternator in my 1984 Dodge Ram is easy to access, otherwise I’d have to take it to a garage to get it replaced. I really can’t afford a car repair this month; I’ve barely worked. This weighs heavily on my mind as I roll over in bed and try to tune out the sound of my wife, who is sitting outside the bedroom window in the driveway of our Hollywood apartment smoking cigarettes and drinking cans of beer from our red and white Playmate. I hear the lid scrape open and shut each time she pulls out another can. I try to keep count, as if the roundtrips to the cooler were sheep, but I keep seeing my truck out on the street, the hood up, my head sunk in the engine bay as I struggle with the stubborn alternator bolt.…
