Secure Your Spot Today by Ben Robinson

February 28, 2023
Poem title: Secure Your Spot Today Poet name: Ben Robinson Poem: The men sipping tallboys by the fountain wish him a good day but he is focused on the pigeons, on the condos, on the trucks that build them. He waves to the workers from his Bobcat! the union constructing luxury Crane! flying yellow banners over a hole they will Forklift! with thirty storeys of tempered glass. Is this witnessing or just watching? Twin excavators idle in an otherwise empty lot. His arms extend, bend in on themselves swinging gleeful. My son, on the side of the wrecking ball and I cannot explain the pair are parked here to move the last tenant along from the apartments above the shuttered antique shop. Upwind of the former lumberyard, he grins as a power shovel shears a steel girder in two. Sixty-three units on the way clad with corrugated metal and brick (but not lumber) to reference the site’s industrial past. A man in a Raptors crewneck explains the silo in the back once brimmed with sawdust – the cleaners leaving each night coated like battered meat. A fan sprays mist over the rubble to keep the particulate down. His spotless teeth halve baby carrots the whole way home. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Ben Robinson Previously published in Grain (50.2 - Winter 2023). Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book. The Book of Benjamin is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work