Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee

and informed the seven of us in his charge

his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man

he never knew, had been possessed,

as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor

and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also

that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother,

born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,

along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,

we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.

As we should also always remember to call him

only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,

and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,

least of all with the title ‘mister’ attached,

which would remind him of that same most hated father

and plunge him therefore into a mood

he could not promise he would, he said, ‘behave

appropriately within’. Fortunately, our job,

unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,

was simple: collect the trash from county’s back roads.

Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness,

this meant not only beer cans and bottles,

all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also

the occasional condom too, as well as the festering

road-kill fresh and ridden with maggotry,

or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar

with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed

into the bed of the township flat-bed truck we ourselves

rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments

then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.