Modern Prototype

Modern Prototype


by Bob Hicok


We melt the old thing into the new thing.
Tongs, a ladle the size of a man’s head
I fill with thoughts of molten steel.
Fire below the cauldron, in our cigarettes,
in the right hand of the man coming back
from the bathroom with his skin mag.
He’d tell me, were I to ask, which stapled woman
ignites him. The night goes on without us.
On break, I read Asimov in my getaway: a bus
day shift’s building that pivots in the center
to make cornering easier. I close my eyes
and think of myself as joined pieces, I’m nineteen
and the money’s good and I still want
to be everything. First night, by way of hello,
a guy told me he fucked his wife
on gravel, she on her knees and he
pulling her head back to devour
her grimace. As if I asked
about sex and pain, nine hundred degrees
and how did I get here? What we create
in the foundry returns to be erased,
this bumper-shape must now become a door-shape,
I’m being taught what a borrowed force
I am, parts lion, pimp. With the overhead crane,
I float tons of cooling metal away, it takes a thumb
on a red button to be God. We’re out of beer,
the foreman tells me, sending me out
under stars to fix our blood, I’m nineteen,
I’m forty-six, still trying to sing the song
of making, how on the edge of the unlit lot,
the demented pit bull growls with teeth
that it sees me, and I growl with pipe
that I see it back, and we join in attacking
the indifference.


Published in Ploughshares