(a poem in three parts)

1.
Big loopy letters dotted with hearts.
Such childish, feminine handwriting
and such heavy consequences...

The insurance examiner’s signature.

2.
The client  sewed 5000 gunnysacks a day
for a whole year and now can’t
use her hands.  But we deny her claim.

A single mother with three children
in an unheated trailer in the winter--
Why should the company  pay for her operation?

We know that she carried water and firewood.
By the time she started at the  factory,
she was already a cracked plate.
                             
3.
The examiner goes home at night
and relaxes with movies. She likes the ones where
ordinary-looking people are really secret
aliens, and the one where,  inside the darkness of
toyboxes, pretty dolls  turn to cannibals,
begin gnashing their little teeth.

Note: Versions of this poem were previously published online in Counterpunch 04 and To Topos Poetry
 International in 2008.