Frito Lay Delivery Driver

A purple and orange sunrise illuminates Coos Bay.

A Frito Lay delivery driver, a young woman,

wearing a ponytail

half a blue uniform,

rolls up the squeaky back door,

climbs inside the truck,

goes to work.

She’s delivering to my grocery store

every Wednesday morning.

Elmer and I walk past every week.

She occasionally nods.

I nod back.

I’ve been writing a lot of poems of late.

Finding others forgotten, mothballed, frozen, stuck in the mud.

One hundred and forty-five for this collection.

The image of a woman carting a tote of potato chips,

a purple and orange sunrise glowing overhead.

screams silently for a poem.

I haven’t written a single poem in 30 years

about the working class.

Here is one staring me in the face

and I can see her face.

What do I know about the working class

to attempt a poem about them?

American politicians know nothing of this delivery driver and her work.

American poets even less.

We turn the corner at the tackle shop.

How did she become a Frito Lay’s delivery driver? What is the job like? What does it pay? How many hundreds of pounds of product does she carry into stores on her route?

What about the woman down the block making donuts?

The woman in Subway slicing turkey and ham?

The meat cutter vaping something on a break?

The drywaller spackling paste?

The crew at the automotive repair shop up the block who fixed my car?

The elderly school bus driver driving her route?

The gas station attendant who plays Charlie Parker?

All these people are working within a hundred yards of me—right now.

I can see them at work.

Poets don’t write poems about them.

Walt Whitman did. He celebrated their lives in wild verse.

No, I don’t care who they voted for President, or if they even voted.

That story has already been told by white sharecroppers who sided with plantation owners

and enlisted in the Confederate Army

or the Dust Bowl farmers who voted for Herbert Hoover and Wendell Willkie

and cursed the New Deal.

That’s a futile exercise in journalism

and sometimes I prefer mystery over journalism.

Not in this case.

I want to meet this Frito Lay delivery driver,

tell her I want to write a poem about her, the job.

Just walk up and introduce myself, Elmer,

take my shot.

A sunrise like this morning might help the cause.