When I was five or six years old at my grandmother’s house in Methuen, my Aunt Irene told my mother about someone where she worked who got fired for not working hard enough. I remember her saying: She got called into the boss’s office and he fired her right there.

And I could see the woman in her nice office dress suddenly going up in flames and I was so shocked that I didn’t even think to ask why my aunt, usually such a kind person, didn’t rush over and put out the fire. Or why this was what they did to people who didn’t work hard enough. I didn’t find out what getting fired really means until years later. I never thought to ask. I just knew I never would go to work in an office, because what if I didn’t work hard enough?

Dotty LeMieux

writes both poetry and poetic memoir. She has five chapbooks published, including two during the pandemic: Viruses, Guns and War (Main Street Rag, 2023) and Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in numerous print and online journals such as Gyroscope, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Poeming Pigeon, Poets Reading the News, Rise Up Review, and Writers Resist, among others. MacQueen’s Quinterly nominated her CNF Spring Trip to Mazatlán for Best of the Net 2024.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ On the Day the Supreme Court Hears Arguments on the Case That Might Overturn Roe v. Wade in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022); nominated by MacQ for the inaugural Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun, 2022

⚡ I Remember: Me and Glenn in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022)