When the men leave there’s a giant hole in the street which honestly doesn’t surprise me. They tear it up then surround it with yellow “caution caution caution” tape which you know the wind is gonna blow off soon enough and then if you’re not careful you could fall in or pop your tire or damage your suspension rods. A friend of mine had to get a whole new car because she drove into a hole in the street.
The workers leave one man behind on a folding chair holding a flip phone and sipping from a blue thermos. It’s his job to watch the hole until the other men come back, or until the city sends further instruction, or until the hole miraculously fills itself back in. But really it’s until someone calls him home for dinner and he can fold things up and drive away, his honest days work done.
And who am I to make assumptions? Maybe he’s going home to a sick mother. Maybe this is his first real job after months of unemployment. Maybe this is just the way streets get fixed in Chicago or sewers or whatever runs under the roads I think are so solid and apparently are not. Look at that hole. Drill a little ways down and it’s all up for grabs. It’s all open space and random construction and here I am driving around thinking it’s all solid under there but really it’s air. I might as well be driving in the sky.
—Cin Salach, “construction” (Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, 2022)
