Would you look at
the tension in her elbow? There she sits,
cuffed and ironed, white blouse and wool skirt.
pin-wrapped hair, a don’t-come-any-closer posture,
flame-red flats lifting the weight of her independence.
…but haze-filled indecision still lingers…
Grown Men,
smelling of aftershave and tobacco,
adjust their belted necessity and wait for her
to understand reason, their vision.
Can’t she see that all morning they have
wasted paper, and this case
is about profit.
And then…
there is Stan- a young man who
gave his brown hair a fresh combing before
grabbing his wife’s pencil from
the ‘for emergencies’ notepad in the hallway of
their inherited starter home.
Who cares about any verdict when
it is a September Friday, and tonight,
while the White Sox go deep, there will be
cold meatloaf sandwiches, sliced thick on warmed sourdough?

– a response to Norman Rockwell’s 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover, The Holdout.