Endless Counting
After college, no one would hire me,
banking found me. Manufacturers Hanover Trust,
a silk container for all things grand
and polished. Chandeliers hung like bracelets,
rugs thick like velvet, walls lined in marble.
I loved it. A lot of money— to count. People
to talk to. Cash in the palm. Every week
People poured in, shaped themselves
into a messy snake. Heckled us when the line
went out the door. Look at them. Lazy bitches.
I grew armor. Put on steel, cool and impenetrable.
I peeked at customer’s accounts. Their fortunes,
overdrafts, even their insecurities. Some of them
practiced magic on me. Asked for change of a hundred,
switched the hundred for a ten. I began to drown
in money. Endless money. The counting endless.
My palms became painted with the ghost prints of other
fingers; stamped one on top of another, each bill
a memory, a story, a lifetime. And I took them
all in, green backs coated in dirt, twenties sickened
with fever, tens sticky with syrup, torn up corners,
bills marqueed with ladies names or lucky
numbers, bills ripped in halves, soaked in pepper
sauce, day old urine, housed in someone’s underpants.
All deposited by me. Banking began to infiltrate
into the darkest parts of me. I felt altered. Almost
mean. Once, a local doctor handed me a thousand-
dollar check, wanted it in twenties and tens. I sent
him to a bank officer, told him it was over my teller
limit. I felt nothing as his hands shook, his eyes
dressed up in terror as he pleaded for his money.
When the bank officer returned, he stated,
He is so afraid of you. What happened?
.
We Knew the Way to the Church Basement
I could hear Helen’s twelve-year-old heart thump.
The church meeting place, darkened, barren. Just the two
of us. We hid behind it’s stage. Pulled the curtains closed
as dust particles crowded the air. Rows of metal chairs
stared at us. Exit signs blinked. Helen said, Shh.
But silence already caught me in a chokehold.
Fast footsteps, down the stairs. Voices. High and low.
Between the curtains, I searched for them. Chairs that
cradled us through Confirmation practice. Empty.
The Gang— Mitzy, Gina and two high school boys,
followed us with ropes as if we were livestock.
Along Fort Washington Avenue, down 180th
street, and across Broadway. To the safe place.
Our church. We knew the way to the basement.
The Gang wanted to talk to us. But—thick ropes
rung their arms like bracelets. Now they were here,
moving amid the room. Ropes hit the innocent
chairs for crimes uncommitted. Sounds of fallen
furniture. I know they’re here, Mitzy yelled.
Helen picked up a prop lamp held it above her head
her biceps young, taut. A tall wood cross lay bare
against the wall, a black dial up phone and the smell
of worn saint costumes lay in cardboard boxes.
My only weapons. I thought about those ropes, thicker
than the ones we jumped with, about the gang boys,
their entitlement. To look and to whistle— at our snug
Wrangler jeans. Our young sweaters. Shoes stomped
the floor near us; knuckles punched the reception table.
Then silence.
Helen, is still holding that lamp on that lightless
stage as Athena might in preparation for war. I never
saw her again. Mitzy got placed in my ninth-grade
class, asked where I got my square-toed heels.
I never asked her about the ropes. Never.
© Roxanne Cardona
Roxanne Cardona was born in New York City of Puerto Rican heritage. Her poems were published in Pine Hill Review, San Antonio Review, ONE ART, Mason Street, Delmarva Review, Constellations, Connecticut River Review, Field Guide Poetry Magazine, CommuterLit, and elsewhere. Her first book, Caught in the Principal’s Lens is forthcoming this spring. She was an elementary school principal and teacher in the South Bronx.
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