Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

The first line tells us from the start that this is a poem of lived experience that aims to communicate directly to its readers or listeners without much embellishment: “At sixteen, I worked after high school hours” (Line 1). The speaker establishes an informal tone, the sense that the poem will say something important. As the past tense conveys that the speaker is now older, it subtly creates an expectation that the poem will go on to comment on the connection between past and present. The following lines, while similarly plain in their language, use line breaks to open up the experience of the job in cinematic style. If “at a printing plant” (Line 2) conjures an image of a generic factory, “that manufactured legal pads” (Line 3) takes the reader through the gates. Espada deliberately chooses the word “manufactured” (Line 3) rather than “made,” to highlight the purpose of the place and hint at its antagonism to the humanity of the workers.

Lines 4-6 zoom in on a more specific and memorable image: “Yellow paper / stacked seven feet high / and leaning.” Espada’s reference to the color of the paper paints a clear and accurate image. The specific reference to “seven feet” indicates that the stack is taller than (almost) any man, another hint at how the product of the labor is set against humanity, with “leaning” only adding to that threat. With this antagonistic force established, in Lines 7-10 the speaker enters the poem again as a much clearer figure, as Espada focuses attention on the labor his 16-year-old self performed. The verbs “slipped” and “brushed” (Lines 7, 9) drive these lines and emphasize how only the worker’s actions create the finished pad out of its constituent materials.

The emphatic negative “No gloves” at the start of Line 11 has the effect of suggesting a rebuke from a supervisor or overseer. This is added to by the explanation which follows: “fingertips required / for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle” (Lines 11-13), although now there is an irony and bitterness in the tone. Applying the concept of “perfection” to paper seems absurd, especially if it is to be created by high schoolers toiling after a day in the classroom. The “exact rectangle” (Line 13) suggests the type of fastidious attention to detail—at the expense of human concerns—which might be required to supervise the work. “Sluggish by 9pm, the hands / would slide along suddenly sharp paper” (Lines 14-15) adds to the portrait of factory labor, where perfection is expected of fallible humans who are increasingly tired and focused on the hand of the clock ticking ever more slowly as the end of the shift approaches. The continuation of the sentence can be read as a description of each minute lengthening, but more immediately they have the effect of making the hands morph into those of the boy, now riddled with papercuts: “and gather slits thinner than the crevices / of the skin, hidden” (Lines 16-17).

Espada takes the final part of the stanza to focus fully on the pain caused by the work: “Then the glue would sting / hands oozing” (Lines 17-18) with the onomatopoeic “oozing” emphasizing the slow secretion of liquid (blood perhaps mixed with the glue) by the body, and again hinting at the painfully slowed-down passage in the final part of the shift “till both palms burned” (Line 18). The poet’s specific use of “palms” here may be an ironic allusion to the words Shakespeare has Juliet speak in Romeo and Juliet: “palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss” (Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Act 1, Scene 5.). The 16-year-old Espada is at a similarly tender age to the famous star-crossed lovers, but in his factory job, any thoughts of love are replaced by a desire for nothing but the work to finish, “at the punchclock” (Line 19). The punchclock is the device into which laborers had to insert their timecard to prove they had worked the full shift, but the “punch” in the word itself is a final reminder of the violence and damage done by the work.

In the poem’s second stanza, time jumps forward dramatically, in contrast to the incremental minute-by-minute of the shift: “Ten years later, in law school” (Line 20). There is a sense of relief at the speaker escaping the factory, yet Espada has not left behind the memory, or the knowledge he gained from the work: “I knew that every legal pad / was glued with the sting of hidden cuts” (Lines 21-22). In the poem’s final image, he draws together the poem’s two central opposing forces: the paper for pads and book, and the hands of the worker that suffered to produce it: “that every open lawbook / was a pair of hands / upturned and burning.” (Lines 23-24). While he has moved on to the white-collar world of law school, Espada knows—and wants his readers to know—that other unknown workers have taken his place, and for them the suffering goes on. The gesture of hands spread palm upwards is a near universal one signaling innocence or lack of knowledge, and here it represents the victimhood of forgotten workers all over the world.