The International Order Of Door-To-Door Salesmen
By Jennifer Hasegawa
Out of work, I’d developed a rash
from being so stressed out
about being so broke.
I put on my faded red suit
and went to a mass interview at a Ramada Inn.
I found myself fighting for a chance
to sell funeral insurance,
door-to-door.
They gave me a stack of surveys.
Get the details:
What does she want her funeral to look like?
Get the signature:
We’ll give you 70 bucks.
They gave me a binder of photos
of caskets,
of satin linings,
of flower arrangements.
They gave me a list
of names and addresses.
I visited homes,
like my parents’ home:
Screen doors
fitted loosely into door jambs.
Wind chimes
shaped like owls and pagodas.
Porches swept
until brooms gave out.
Out of each door,
opened pensively,
if at all,
puffed the smell
of years of living,
of waiting.
One woman let me in
and talked me through photos
of her grandson
for two hours.
Another woman
made me a BLT
while I watched her son
shoot up on the sofa.
One man told me
to f*ck off and die.
Address numbers nailed
to the front of his house
were painted on the bottoms
of empty sardine tins.
I stopped carrying the binder.
I put one survey on my clipboard
and just started walking
and knocking.
I arrived at a narrow Victorian
with its windows painted black.
A wall of a woman opened the door,
and smiled. Her eyes,
wrestling panda bears.
On one front tooth:
a gleaming gold cap with a star cutout.
On the other:
a crescent moon.
She regarded me and said:
You are as bare
as the day you were born
and that is beautiful,
but you gotta get the hell
off my porch.
She passed her hand over my head
and a breeze moved down the block,
turning up leaves and balls of hair.
The unseen that gives and takes.
The instant magic of fear
and the slow-burrowing hoodoo
of suggestion.
Years later, there’s a black chicken
threaded through the door handles
of a bank downtown. You step in the pool
of its blood and slip.
Damn, you’re a hot thief in the night now
with tons of cash
and you put on at least 17 layers
before you go anywhere.
You hit the ground hard.
You are covered in blood.
All you see is flowers, all you feel
is satin.
