Poem of the Week: Sheila Black

  

"My Mission is to Surprise and Delight" 

 

My daughter works in the Apple Store--the Help Center, open 24-7,

people from all fifty states, angry because their iPhones

malfunctioned or they don't know how to program their data

plans. She practices sounding knowledgeable yet ditzy; mysterious

yet lucid, and able to reassure. She has never been ranked down for

a "bad conversation, " and they rate every call. Some of the kids

lose it--the ones who get fired." A bit better than minimum.wage,

but not much. "You get addicted to the notion-what would it

mean to be the perfect Apple helper every time?" They reward.her

with T-shirts. "You are the Future!" in a pretty Apple box. And

letters signed "Apple." "We know you have dreams. We know

you are the one we have been waiting for." They have taken

over the Wells Fargo Bank building downtown, a row of white

Apple cubicles made of slick plastic-beautifully designed. Steve

Jobs said "simplicity takes effort." He said "Apple is for the

person with the unique mind." After work, my daughter and her

co-workers bend over their iPhones, When I say "rosemary,"

my daughter Googles a picture of it. Her latest t-shirt bears the slogan

"My mission is to surprise and delight." This annoys her faintly.

"How can I wear it outside the Apple Help Center?" she asks. "Apple

loves you," says the latest letter. I want to say "You, Steve Jobs, did

not invent a machine alone. No you, Steve Jobs, invented a new

form of loneliness. No wonder you were not able to live forever.

The body has to get its own back somehow. How you have.separated

each from each, self from self, the anti-parable in which

all breads and loves become as one. The silver apple, which

will never be edible, will never be baked into any kind of pie."

I ask my daughter how she does it-eight hours, call after call,

and everyone angry, or sad, or simply frustrated. "I never speak

as myself," she replies, "but as Phone Girl." Phone Girl has no

past, no present, no family. Phone girl is all light and longing.

She is only a voice, and a voice can be anything." My daughter

holds out her hands, "She is a light you can see straight through."

-Sheila Black

Used by permission.

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone, Love/Iraq (both CW Press) and Wen Kroy (Dream Horse Press) which won the Orphic Prize in Poetry. She co-edited with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), named a Notable Book for Adults for 2012 by the American Library Association (ALA). She has received the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Award and was a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs the literary arts center Gemini Ink.  

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