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| Susan Eisenberg |
Susan Eisenberg is a poet, visual artist,
and oral historian who works within and across genres. Her work
re-imagines the everyday, playing with scale and juxtaposition to
investigate issues of power and social policy. Stanley’s Girl
(Cornell, 2018) is her fifth poetry collection. She entered the
construction industry in 1978 at the start of affirmative action—among
the first women in the country to become a licensed, journey-level
electrician in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
(IBEW); and worked fifteen years on Boston-area construction sites. In
1991, she began interviewing other tradeswomen pioneers from across the
U.S., which became the basis for We’ll Call You If We Need You (Cornell, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book, being re-issued in 2018 with a New Preface. She
was introduced to the craft of poetry by Denise Levertov and is a
graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She
was 2016-2017 Twink Frey Visiting Social Activist at the University of
Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women and is a Resident
Artist/Scholar at Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center where she
directs the On Equal Terms Project. Her
work has been awarded “Engaging New Audiences” and “Freedom and Justice
for All” special project grants from Mass Humanities, New England Poetry
Club’s Daniel Varoujan Award, and three writing fellowships at
Hedgebrook.
In Flight
Daybreak. I’m
weeping as the airplane speeds
along the
runway toward take-off.
One question
I’d asked
in the
just-recorded interview throbs
through my
brain: Were you
ever physically threatened
by
co-workers or a supervisor?
On the tape,
one hears early morning birdsong
and––from an
upstairs window––her young son,
just awake,
calling for his mom’s attention
as she answers,
matter-of-factly, Three
times
someone
tried to kill me. Gives
detail. We hug.
I’m rushed to
the airport for this flight. Her eyes,
her son’s
tender face, her jawline, follow.
My seatmate may
have asked what was wrong.
It would not
have taken much to start me babbling.
A long flight,
west coast to east, for those hours
we become
confidantes. A black gay man
working his way
up the ranks in banking (I learn,
somewhere over
the Rockies) with his own
open wounds. We
exhume stories, hoping the other
will catch what
we’d missed,
and together,
floating over earth, we might
explain our
species. We’re on deadline.
Across Montana,
North Dakota, Wisconsin,
Michigan,
Ontario, New York, we weave
disparate
threads into one loom
of history and
geography. Ask out loud,
What
propels a person to maim or kill
over a
job. A vote. A kiss. A place in line.
I swear we try
to solve all that. And fail.
Landing in
Boston we become again strangers,
rushing off
with suitcases of shared sorrows.
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