PPA
Can you imagine:
the PPA officer
who’s writing your ticket
has a life
outside
of writing tickets?
Goes to a smoker’s bar
after his shift
& drinks it all, down
to the toilet water,
who has a wife
that wraps up his leftover
spaghetti & shoves it
in the microwave,
has children,
who lie to him,
who he feeds anyway
with the crumbs that he makes
from taking money
from you.
It doesn’t help –
you are furious,
running fiercely
toward him
from the PNC Bank,
10th & South,
The ticket is scrolling
from the machine
You are yelling,
The receipt expired
only 3, maybe 5 minutes ago –
sometime while you were walking back.
You’re over-thinking
about the lost money
you already gave the meter,
the long line at the store
you stood anxiously in, time
passing swiftly on your wrist-
watch, the orange gas tank light
on the dashboard,
the money you never have
to drive, money you ran out of
to park.
A driver stops traffic
to honk at him,
sees clearly
through his badge, his uniform,
his hyper-tinted faux
sheriff-sunglasses & knows
that jawline anywhere,
can see those cheekbones,
that uneven hairline,
from a mile away.
He smiles, waves,
says, “Sup Tim,”
Tim nods, says,
“Sup,”
The driver looks at you,
“Do we have a problem,” he asks
& you wonder what “we”
has gathered before you,
what kind of membership
this is,
under what pact
this alliance has formed,
how anyone could relate to him
outside of that badge,
how anyone driving a car
perhaps, circling the block
for parking, could see
that ticketing machine
in his hand
& want to protect him.
You warn the driver,
“Friends of PPA officers
burn in hell too.”
The endless South Street
full of cars behind him
honk, eager to spill through
the city’s streets,
They save you.
He drives away,
you snatch the ticket
you know you can’t afford
from the officer’s hand
For all you care,
he could write more tickets
tow it, grind it up in a junkyard,
you think about leaving
the piece of shit right there
in the parking spot,
& you would,
if only you didn’t need it
so damn much
to get home.
Glorious Piner
Glorious Piner is a writer from West Philadelphia who takes a peculiar interest in the raking out the exciting idiosyncratic details of the mundane. She is a rising first-year MFA Creative Writing major at the University of Maryland. She organizes the Paperback Poetry Festival -- a yearly poetry festival engaged in bringing together disparate parts of the poetry community -- and it’s attendant literary journal. Through writing, community outreach, and event organizing, she is determined to dismantle the segregative notions that force distance and difference between sub-literary communities and communities at large.