Collecting Cash at the Phallic Factory
Valerie Nies
It’s the summer before my sophomore year in college
and I’m sheathed in blue-collared testosterone eyes
inside a cement cube. A factory of men
who smell like cigarettes, toxic citrus
GOJO hand soap, and no-means-yes. I work
twelve-hour days on an assembly line in August heat alongside stubbly men
who think I’m there for them,
not the 16 bucks an hour I will save
to pay my living expenses in the fall
at a state university, where I will write essays
about Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication on the Rights
of Women to work beside men equally, putting parts
together for excavation equipment.
Pistons and heads and seals and shafts
to build masculine mechanical dinosaurs that bore
holes in dirt, penetrate
earth for urban development.
Men who drive big-wheeled trucks silhouetted
in window decals of impossibly busty women
with extreme nipples
and cartoon hair with ends
that never split.
I hide
myself in dialogue. Tell the men I love
Black Sabbath, I love the Sabbath,
start every sentence with my boyfriend.
My boyfriend lifts weights at the gym too.
My boyfriend likes when I wear a ponytail.
My boyfriend bought me pepper spray.
A short one chases me with a spray bottle
to splash water on my chest, like we are in an
episode of Three’s Company,
so I hide myself in the baggiest, cotton t-shirts so the men
will think I am one of them, forget they thought
I’m here to tempt them from their wives or temper
their loneliness from the wives who left them.
Tell them to turn up the volume,
I love The Cars I say as they drool and watch me
shove rods inside hydraulic cylinders. They fantasize
I am pushing them into some kind of metal fleshlight.
Hide myself in kindness and gifts, pull out
from my Igloo cooler at lunch by the lockers
confidence and candy: Twizzlers and Kit Kats
to distract them, like throwing bread at ducks.
One day, a tall one corners me,
says he wants to watch me suck on a lollipop, whip licorice with my tongue,
choke on chocolate.
And I’d love to say I called HR or
that I quit my job, but I did neither.
And I could give you a file cabinet of excuses:
it was 1999, my dad worked at the same plant,
I didn’t want to find out whose side he’d take, all
the women who came before me had it worse,
I didn’t know I could find mentors in the generation
after mine, the younger women who would not
put up with, would not fumble in hot rage, would not
boys will be boys away their comfort, would not stay silent,
would not.
Collecting Cash at the Phallic Factory
