First College Job

CLARITY: EMERGENT PHENOMENON | Moment Three Hundred Twenty-Eight

Stephanie introduced me to Ellen,
my first college boss.
Hired to sort alumni donor pledges
in the Office of Development.

I liked the job.
It was simple
and in the first skyscraper
I had ever been.

From the seventeenth
or eighteenth floor
I’d look over Chicago to the north
with its beautiful menagerie of buildings
defiantly thrusting upward
from what was once swampland,
the high-rise Taylor Homes
to the south
with tattered curtains
flailing in the wind
through burnt-out windows.

Going to and from work
every day along 35th Street,
emergency vehicle sirens wailed
and gunshots popped
nearby.