If I could manufacture a pencil
from its inception as wood on a tree, granite from rocks
to that finely crafted wooden object
we use to fill out bubbles on standardized tests
I’d be a free market economic mystery.
If I could work in a factory
piecing small but critical parts of a tablet
I’d hold all the world in my hands
and perhaps many more worlds—
should my imagination stretch so far.
But I work in the sadness factory
which is all those things and nothing at once.
An empty place with a chair and a table.
No fancy conveyor belt nor repetitive assembly.
And sit and sit and sit.
The Sadness Factory
Lucy Zhang 