Breadcrumb #540

SARAH BRIDGINS

A friend told me she envies
how much I love
beautiful things.
I had just bought a pink velvet couch
and was sharing pictures of it
like it was my child.

With every year that passes,
I want children less,
beautiful things more.
A ring adorned with rainbow sapphires,
a leather bag from Florence, 
my face injected with poison
to keep it beautiful forever.

Children are beautiful,
but they are also bombs,
their fragile bodies unstable,
so easily ignited by a falling brick,
a too hot car. Turn around
for a moment and they're gone,
your life, exploded.

I'm not going to risk
that kind of loss.
I'm still digging myself out
from the wreckage
of too many other disasters.
My body can't sustain 
another life, my heart
pumps pink velvet. 

• • •

Breadcrumb #539

K. JOFFRÉ

18 Job Search and Interview Tips for People Who No Longer Believe in Meritocracy:

1. The most common interview question you will receive is “tell me about yourself.” Answer the question with confidence; talk about your job, your life, and try to avoid the pupils of the hiring manager as they drift over the surface of your skin as they try to discern why they don’t trust you.

2. When meeting with hiring managers or recruiters, shake their hand firmly, strongly, as if your grip and theirs form an ancestral bond of warriors and cavemen. If you are a woman attempt to do the same in a pale imitation of men. If you are a black person then do not shake the hand so firmly.

3. When applying for a job be sure to tailor your resume to the job posting. Are you using the same exact words in your resume as in the posting? Mold yourself to fit the job, but don’t just stop there. Do you look like the hiring manager? Are you speaking like them? Do you sleep when they sleep? Do you dream their same dreams?

4. Do not be discouraged by companies who ghost you after one or even three interviews. Understand that they do this because there is no legal way to tell you that you did not get the job because you are not a white man.

5. File for unemployment early if necessary and attend any local job fairs with openings that suit your skills. Ignore the fact that the majority of the other attendants are women, older people, and people of color. One of the attendants may be a pregnant woman who walks timidly into the room. She may take a seat near you while her belly barely fits into the gap between the chair and the desk. She may ask a lot of questions and you may overhear her tell another person that she was laid off. There may be a bilious rage in the pit of your stomach and you may know this as despair.

“One of the attendants may be a pregnant woman who walks timidly into the room.”

6. Don’t listen to the advice of job recruiters. They are fools. If one of their ideas helps you then know that this help is purely coincidental. Apply that same logic to this list.

7. If you score an interview then devote time to researching the company. A good google news search will produce several pertinent points of conversation for your interview. You will also invariably come across various company misgivings; crimes against the state, crimes against humanity, victim testimonials, etc. It would be wise to ignore these negative stories as they do not directly apply to your particular application and have more to do with the general ongoing downfall of capitalism.

8. Review the details of your resume before a call or an interview and turn them into an engaging story. Did you start as a low-level employee and quickly rise to the role of manager? Did your job shift halfway through, and did this new role inspire the future of your career track? Learn your story and be prepared to recite it during your interview. Did you embellish any part of your resume? Good. All great stories are based on lies. Grow the lie, give it life, make yourself the hero. As a wise woman once said: “Don’t dream it, be it.”

9. Don’t forget who you are.

10. Faraway from where you live, in the mountains, or a forest glade, or a lake, you may find yourself holding hands with your beloved, or surrounded by friends or family, and you may witness a spectacular view containing such a great and ample beauty that you will briefly forget the drudgery of your job, your unemployment, your poverty, your job search. Cherish that feeling.

11. Always prepare an elevator pitch before an interview. What is an elevator pitch? It used to be a very quick way for men to sexually harass women while they were both trapped in an elevator. It has since been reclaimed by salespeople and the worst hiring managers.

12. A hiring manager or recruiter who makes it a point to only hire candidates who send thank you notes is really only looking for boot lickers. Do not send a thank you note in the hope that it will get you an offer. Send a thank you note because it is the right thing to do. Because thanking people is a skill that builds your character. For more on the incidental nature of recruiters see # 6 on this list.

13. Toni Morrison distilled the following advice from her father. She said: “Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself. You make the job; it doesn’t make you. Your real life is with us, your family. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.” You should make some time to read Toni Morrison.

14. If you are asked “What is your biggest weakness?” during an interview then consider the fact that the interviewer doesn’t know what they are doing. Use this knowledge against them.

15. The easiest way to land a job is through a referral within your network. Think about this for a second. What is the best way for society to consolidate power than to play structural keep-away with high-paying jobs, education, and housing? This sort of advice masks our deep history of bigotry and redlining. It is obviously code for “like people hire like people” presented as innocuous advice. By all means, network, and leverage your privilege to get a job, because that is what your privilege is for. At any rate, yes, the easiest way to land a job is through a referral.

16. Prepare a sharp business outfit for your interview that is pressed, tailored, and clean. Any sign of unkemptness will reveal your class difference to the hiring manager who will immediately void any skills and experience that you have to offer.

17. The people who love you believe in you more than you may believe in yourself. This may be a scary thought at first if you really think about it. You can easily fall into worry that you may disappoint them. This feeling is valid if not also fleeting. The truth is you cannot fail them if you are true and you are just. The key is not to measure yourself against their love, but to enjoy your time with them. For more on this see # 9 on this list.

18. You must be strong even as your country tries to kill you. You must remove from your mind the fact that your government is locking your people in cages, that your courts are ruling on the merits of your life, that your neighbor’s children are laughing at all of this, mocking your place among them. You must show up, shake hands with your hiring manager, firmly or not so firmly, watch their pupils as they scan the surface of your skin, and you must endure. Then you must always remember to send a thank you note.

• • •

Breadcrumb #537

KEVIN GRIFFIN MORENO

My ancestors believed that the source of all rivers
is the maw of the ravenous sea monster Cipactli -   
part male, part female, part reptile, part amphibian, part fish -
slaughtered by Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”), who shaped 
its mighty carcass into the green scaffolding of the earth. 

My own source is in dispute:
neither fish, nor fowl, nor snake, nor toad,
nor Mexican, nor American, nor heathen, nor pious,
nor here nor there, but always thirsty. A bend.
A meander. A confluence of departures.

For example: one day my father and I went walking along the Danube 
(named for Danu, the primordial water, mother of the serpent Vritra,
who imprisoned all the rivers of the world 
until it was slain by Indra, King of Heaven).
On the bank, saucer magnolias bloomed a pink so delicate 
it was all I could do to not shove the petals in my mouth. 
He said we would be leaving Austria forever, 
and in my grief I gathered dead beech leaves 
in a white envelope, as if I could send home through the mail. 

Years later, my mother and I went walking by the mouth of the Patapsco
(which may mean “black water,” “white rocks,” or “tide covered with froth”). 
She took me to hear a man who said he could warp the shape of ice crystals, 
simply by scrawling curses on jars of water and freezing them.
Snake oil and bullshit, I sneered. 
But some time afterward, a Wixáritari magician 
anointed my bare chest with spit and ashes, 
and he said I should plant a coin and a candle 
in the waters of the swift-flowing North Saskatchewan.
And, yearning for a river to flow on, I did. 

My ancestors believed that when Chalchiuhtlicue (“She of the Jade Skirt”),
god of baptism and storms, destroyed the Fourth Sun, 
she transformed humans into fish so they could survive the coming flood. 
Then she broke her water on a red chair, and two babies, 
female and male, slithered away from her on that rushing tide.

My father I remember as a coward, for the most part. 
But once, on a hill overlooking the Shenandoah
(possibly “River of Swans”), on a day of grey light,
he spotted a man poised to kill a copperhead, and said: 
“Mister, if you hit that snake, I will strike you down.”  

A century ago, my grandfather left his home in the High Place of the Frogs 
and followed the Left-Handed Hummingbird across the desert
until he came to the Place Where the Prickly Pears Grow Among the Rocks,
which floats on the memory of the Place of the Herons,
just below the surface of the Navel of the Moon.
All three places - mythical, ancient, and contemporary - 
lie superimposed on each other like acetate transparencies, 
nourished by a network of revenant canals 
that swirl around an island 
where a rattlesnake writhes in an eagle’s mouth.

My ancestors believed that the roots of the Tree of Life 
are watered by an underground river 
that snakes through black defiles 
and carries the fleshless dead
to the nine levels of Mictlān. 

I believe that one day I will board a canopied barge 
on which the name of my mother is spelled out in flowers, 
and I will pass between the bones of abandoned gods, 
and I will flow down that ghost stream towards home.

• • •

Breadcrumb #536

MATTHEW FIGUEROA

We ask so much of the dead
afraid to ask anything of the living
I think it has to do with listening
people are always too busy
worrying about the past or things
that have yet to pass while the dead
are completely present they won’t
cut you off mid-sentence the dead
don’t give you pressure but space
to make your own decisions the dead
won’t poison you with their opinions
maybe we’d all be better off
dead at least then I’d have
something in common with other
people all hope for human connection
has bled out of me through all the words
that slashed through my self-esteem I, too,
must be a dead thing there’s no way
you can call the life I lead “living” so
I feel most at peace among tombstones
telling all the other corpses my deepest
wishes because being able to speak
freely and be heard
is fulfillment

• • •