employee of the month

your new employee
has no credentials
but he's living,
breathing and sober.
he works hard
without complaint.
so he fits in
perfectly.
he needs a cigarette
every other hour,
but that's fine too.
he likes hard rock
music. aerosmith
and journey, Kansas
ten years after.
led zeppelin.
he plugs the cassettes
into the boom box
in the room that
he's painting.
politely, he keeps
it at a non ear deafening
decibel. he has no
tattoos of satan
or pentagrams,
as far as you know,
so that's a step up
from your last employee.
at lunch he tells you
a story about when he
was in jail for fifteen
days. when he got out
his wife had sold
his double wide trailer,
his Harley, all his
weapons, his clothes
and shoes, and cleaned
out the seven hundred
dollars in their joint
savings account. but he
doesn't seem mad about
it at all as he takes a bite
of some beef jerky.
she made her move, he
says. got to hand it
to her, she made her move
when she could. I
guess I'd have done
the same to her if she'd
been the one in jail.
oh well. beef jerky?
he says, sticking out
a reddish strip of rawhide
jerky. sure, you say,
cutting a piece with a pair
of scissors.
I got a new girlfriend now,
though he says, smiling.
she only charges fifty
dollars. she's twenty four
and she can go
all night. any sisters, you
ask, jokingly, before
getting up to go
back to work.