Calendar
ERIC CHILES
The foreman’s office occupied
the front end of the equipment
trailer, wooden steps leading
to a scavenged door - inside
blueprints on a sawhorse table,
a couple folding chairs, always
a girlie calendar on the wall.
Billy gleamed when he showed
her off. Wouldn’t ya want
a piece of that, he’d ask, patting
her legs, the name Coleman’s
Lumber across the top of June’s
thirty days in the year 1966.
Don’t the stain give her a nice tan?
Outside, the frame of the bible
church rose from the mud, stacks
of two by fours and plywood golden
in the morning sun. It was 9 a.m.
coffee break, and we gathered
to break bread and praise Billy’s
handiwork in silent disbelief.
Eric Chiles is an adjunct professor of Journalism and English at a number of colleges and universities in eastern Pennsylvania and was a prize-winning print journalist for more than 30 years. His poetry appears in Allegro, American Journal of Poetry, Chiron Review, Gravel, Plainsongs, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Third Wednesday and other journals. His poem “The orchid garnish" won the 2015 Cape Cod Writers Center Poetry Contest. In 2014 he completed a 10-year section hike of the Appalachian Trail.