Kathleen Ossip
The Union
ACT-UAW 7902
December 2022
The tundra was dying while the particular wired gaze
of administration counted and undercounted,
never moving past the endpoint or outside the spreadsheet cells.
Counting is a mean straight line.
How little can we get away with. How little do they need.
To the living spirit…thought and scholarship must be free.
Who knew the ideal would have this long sequel?
So all we cared about was money,
said the attorney at $400/hour. A performance with some shade.
So money brought us together.
Well, a communal regard attracts itself to itself
and your concern to my concern
as drops attracted form a pool.
When the mind's locked, the hands blocked,
it must be that someone is hoarding a lot of those green paper rectangles.
I think it's linked
to bodies that do without time or dry-erase markers.
We marched.
We wanted a museum, we got a street party.
From 20 to 90 marched, vivid in our occupation,
on peanut butter pretzels and smoothies from Liquiteria.
Aspirational managers baffled:
Did you ever think you’d be on that side?
The side in love with the incalculable.
We wanted no more unpaid labor we got questions,
What will we make? Which side on? the longlasting questions
and that good old companion, the Universe,
the one who watches and never steps in.
During Zoom lulls, Ella sang “Moonlight in Vermont”
to the jazz players, the cranky writers, the knitwear heroine.
For a minute, another world.
That ended in a chorus of thank you's.
Spreadsheet won.
Spreadsheet won and said it lost,
a fine cake to have and eat. Sugary.
But in the tundra of their beds, they toss in their wrong.
The sweats start like diabetes. Mom, Preacher:
Old voices in the head scolding strictly and without stint.
A rich belly does some to numb it.
Begin an ungowning: puffy tams trashed, poplin ripped, the medieval
dream of university sullied from the start, when it was
only the well stuffed, only for themselves.
We want dentists, time, markers, money, and to
afford to give without stint.
From the start, a contract is a diminished thing.
What must be demanded is already scrap.
Apply conviction, still, to every jagged surface.
If you care about yourself and something bigger,
you’ll fail (guaranteed) but will you be sorry?
If there isn’t an archive, start one.
For a while it was the longest adjunct strike in US history.
When you sleep, sleep as dreamers, not dead.