JEN COLEMAN is a Minnesotan living in Portland, OR by way of DC and New York.  She currently applies her skills as a factory worker, gas station attendant, dish washer, chocolate shaver, night stocker and school bus driver to her work as outreach director for Oregon Environmental Council. Jen helps organize the Spare Room reading series and writes with the 13 Hats creative collective.

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It's okay to mourn what's impossible.

A therapist told me that once, when I wanted to conceive a baby with another woman. First, to recognize that there is this thing that's impossible.
And then, also, that it is, after all, what I want.

Poetry. Work.

***
As a kid, I wanted to be a lawyer, a marine biologist, a welder, poet and an actress. Those "jobs" make it permissible to argue, explore, discover, weld, write, act and play.

Then a "job" became selling time for what it will pay. The hiring manager at Target laughed at my job history I’d characterized as "various unskilled labor.” She hired me to stock shelves from 10 PM to 6 AM.

One night, I had a box of 1,000 plastic bags, each containing a lantern mantle. The slippery little bags had to go on a display hook one at a time.

Some poets compose in their heads. Stocking lantern mantles, I couldn't think of a thing to think of.

***
"I want"—it pleaded—All its life—

***
I'd like to believe nothing is impossible. It’s wanting to believe that nothing is impossible that makes the impossible invisible. I want my way around it, right up to the edges of it, without ever knowing it exists. It.

I want—was chief it said

***
I worked in factories. Janitor, hotel maid, gas station attendant, dish washer. I drove a school bus. I tried to write in the time provided by each job’s inefficiencies. I was  tired.

At Holiday gas station, my workmates were fired for trying to guess winners among unsold scratch-off lottery cards. Another was fired when the till came up $200 short. I saw her later working at the SuperAmerica station. My weekly paycheck was $200.

***
When Skill entreated it—the last—

At the three ring binder factory, not much happened. The break time bell was loud. The punch clock was violent.

Driving a school bus, a lot happened. Lives were at risk. I was paid seven dollars an hour: the most I'd ever earned.

***
I can't stand stifled expression. Even the crudest suggestion in a narrative makes me weep. My sinuses are inflamed for hours after watching a romantic comedy. Usually it is stifled love, but it might be stifled anything.

A mailman prepares to express his philosophy, tries, is misunderstood, I melt.

In a predictable narrative, I am destroyed before the stifling happens. A mailman prepares...forget it. I am melting.

And when so newly dead—

I could not deem it late—to hear
That single—steadfast sigh—

***
I applied to graduate school to stop driving a school bus. How did I get in? How did I get funded? I still wonder. I loved it. I wrote a manuscript called The School Bus Murders. None of the poems were about work or school buses.

***
After graduate school, I was astounded to get a job at an environmental advocacy nonprofit. I stayed 11 years. I remember an article in their copy of "Direct Marketing News" that advised against hiring creative writing graduates.

In my job, I use the same words over and over:
Critical. Health. Action. Climate. Water. Toxic. Dollars. Strategic. Now.

My job was to write, but I found ways to argue, explore, discover, act, play, and ,once, to weld. I built a lower-case letter “e” costume. Seriously. I got paid. It was awesome. My job today is similar. People ask me to do stuff, I do it, they love it. It's great. It’s great.

***
Andrew Joron suggests that, when poetry becomes work, it is a prison.

I want security, consumer choice and fungible social capital. I want everyone I meet to understand how I sell my time, and to have an opinion about it. I have those things. 

That single—steadfast sigh—
The lips had placed

***
I've teamed up with writers and artists in a “collective inquiry” project called 13 Hats. I feel embraced by the "ekklesia" as David Brazil and Sara Larsen describe it: creatives  who have "experienced the call, volatilized by its seeming irreconciliability with their worldly station, and therefore affined to those in whom they recognize a kindred predicament."

But I don't feel volatilized. I am lazy. I tell myself I am free from ambition. I write and read when compelled to. My poems work when someone reads them.

I am in mourning. What impossible is invisible here?

—it pleaded—

Or as Rod Smith writes in The Spider Poems:
In my life o this life. yes, this one. o, it.
***
Once, in high school, I told my parents that Emily Dickinson's poems were "rhyme-y little poems from hell."

At the circuit board factory, clean-suits taped up the boards to expose only circuits that would receive electroplating. My job was to pull off the tape after electroplating. It was too loud to talk. Too consuming to read. Too boring to think.

***
Toward Eternity—

***
My dad is a philosopher and laborer. Thomas Coleman. When he could no longer work for wages, he turned to art full time: carving angels, from pine, with a knife.
When Parkinson's and arthritis made carving impossible, he read Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, the Book of Mormon. He writes sonnets. Sometimes about how he is more fight than cry.

He says everything is a story: science is a story, history is a story, the bible is a story and all truths are different stories or the same story.

It has to do with story, and if you tell the story, and this is the way it is, this is not about belief, this is not about possible or impossible. This is about action.

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"I want"—it pleaded—All its life—

I want—was chief it said

When Skill entreated it—the last—

And when so newly dead—



I could not deem it late—to hear

That single—steadfast sigh—

The lips had placed as with a "Please"

Toward Eternity—
Emily Dickinson