Prolit

a literary magazine about money, work, & class

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.