Bernadette Geyer   WHITE HOUSE PLUMBER, 27 YEARS A smile devoid of irony, you grin with lips unused to parting in delight, hidden so long beneath your voluminous but well-kept moustache. You are happy: eyes narrowed to slivers, the skin at their corners radiating in laugh lines. A crisp button front shirt you’d never wear on the job. Your photograph hangs beside the Head Storekeeper of 46 years, above the Florist of 18. Immortalized here, on your elbow, beneath the porcelain sink, head close to the bend just where the pipe enters the wall. Did you go home that evening, pull your wife close, inhale the scented gratitude of her hair just where it tucks behind her ear? Did you ask yourself Now will they see me as she sees me? Oh, to finally be recognized for your worth— with this photo, catching tourist eyes in the White House Visitors’ Center, on the same wall as the Engineering Foreman of 41 years, the Assistant Usher of 16. Though none so prominently placed as the Doorman of 46 years: shown poised near the front door, along with the President’s dog, both heads angled toward the unseen that approaches from beyond the radiant geometry of the opened door, from beyond the frame of the photograph. Master, mistress, any comers to validate their calling.   FACTORY, MILAN The smell of chemical solvents mixes with that of the gases released by hydraulic machines, the blinding stench of a blowtorch and, on the other side of the room, a cigarette. Drill presses stamp and click a marching rhythm against the hiss and echo of the other machinery. On locker-door posters, women spread their legs, revealing shaved crotches, pink like raw shellfish. A man picks up a bamboo coat tree, moves it to his new work station. Gently, he hangs his jacket on one of the branches and turns to his duties.   Ellyn Weiss Weaponized Agent, 2003 Acrylic and oilbar on canvas, 30" x 32" see more work by Ellyn Weiss   THE ROSE FOREGETS ITS BEAUTY Drunk on its own scent head slung and weeping like a barfly, the rose sags over the side of the vase, shedding petals like tears into a cradle of baby’s breath.     I BECOME LIKE PROUST It is now twenty years that we have been meeting like this, in out-of-the-way diners where we are sure to go unrecognized. It is twenty years, and I no longer know what to say to you—the mystery long gone like the color in your beard, the tautness of my figure. You'd think I'd have grown more comfortable with these long silences, but instead, I become like Proust, noticing how you lay out your cutlery— parallel, equidistant. I note each fray in the cuff of your sleeve; which buttons have recently been restitched with a thread slightly whiter than the rest. I listen to each syllable uttered at the table next to us, allowing diphthong and syntax to roll around my head the way you play wine against your tongue before you swallow. How I hate seeing you through this microscope that I have taken to carrying—your every imperfection magnified until they edge you out of the picture, distort memory, chase me away one more time.     THE FOOT REMEMBERS ITS FAVORITE SHOE It was an open-toed rust-orange wedge that hissed when passing the other girls. Thinking back to that virgin exposition – that first time pink polish shone out from under a steel-and-wood desk too low for legs to cross and uncross, the foot remembers wanting to dangle carelessly, seductively, wanting to clack clack that heel all day up and down the holy halls of St. Cecilia’s junior high. The foot sighs, naked, remembering.     THREE BIRDS Three birds drifted to the ground like leaves. As I drew nearer, I realized they were leaves. No matter how far I walked away from those leaves, never again could they be three birds.     Bernadette Geyer is author of the poetry chapbook What Remains (Argonne House Press). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, 32 Poems, The Potomac Review, and Gargoyle. Geyer’s full-length poetry collection, Dead Men, was a finalist for the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award, and for the Richard Snyder Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Geyer serves as editor-in-chief of The Word Works and works as a freelance writer/editor in Vienna, Virginia.   Published in Volume 8, Number 3, Summer 2007.