by Diana Morley.
If you don’t have a degree
we can’t use you.
Thirty matchbook cover cutouts
saved, rubberbanded, over decades.
I brought them along to each new house
tucked into a box with pencils and stamps
till they fell off my desk and the band broke.
Yellow-and-black comic-book images
show one man talking to another behind
a desk. On the backside is an ad for
a high school course—each cover’s the same.
Were those images saved for a poem
never written? …we can’t use you
does smack of scorn and exploitation
but thirty copies?
Oh, now I remember, saved for a collage
never created after art school years.
My art work’s no longer in style—sorry
comics, after all this time, I can’t use you.