Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Lucia Maria Perillo’s "First Job" is a vivid and unsentimental reflection on labor, gender, and fleeting youth, rendered through the gritty setting of Gambelli’s restaurant. The poem captures the exhaustion and quiet endurance of aging waitresses, the indifferent misogyny of their boss, and the speaker’s own initiation into the indignities of low-wage work. Yet, amidst the drudgery, there is an ephemeral moment of beauty—a recognition of shared humanity and a fleeting sense of transcendence.

The poem opens with an image of physical labor: “Gambelli’s waitresses sometimes got down on their knees / searching for coins dropped into the carpet—” The act of kneeling suggests servitude, desperation, and weariness, reinforcing the idea that these women are working-class survivors, scouring for even the smallest recompense. Their description that follows—“hair coiled and stiff, lips coated in that hennaed shade of red”—paints them as women who, despite their exhaustion, maintain the remnants of their femininity, though perhaps in a hardened, almost artificial way. The “hennaed” lipstick signals a worn glamour, a banner for “lives spent in the wake of husbands dying without pensions.” These women are not just waitresses; they are widows, remnants of another life, forced into endless movement to sustain themselves.

The description of their “bodies used in ceaseless marching toward the kitchen’s mouth” is striking, transforming them into figures of relentless motion, their very existence shaped by labor. Their “firm legs migrating slowly ankleward” suggests the gradual erosion of youth, their bodies succumbing to gravity, their former vitality sinking toward the ground. The kitchen is depicted as a devouring force, swallowing them over and over again.

From this doorway, the predatory gaze of Frankie Gambelli falls upon them: “Frankie Gambelli would sic a booze-eye on them, / his arms flapping in an earthbound pantomime / of that other Frank: The Swooned-Over.” The comparison to Frank Sinatra is almost laughable—where Sinatra captivated audiences, Gambelli clumsily mimics charm, his gestures weighed down by earthbound vulgarity. His crude dismissal—“You old cunts,” he’d mutter. “Why do I put up with you old cunts?”—reveals his disdain, yet, as the poem notes, “never managing to purge his voice’s tenor note of longing.” This contradiction is key: beneath his insults, there is an unspoken dependence, perhaps even affection, for these women who keep his business afloat. His cruelty is habitual, but it does not erase the fact that these women are necessary.

The speaker, in contrast to the seasoned waitresses, is an outsider: “At me—the summer girl—he’d only stare / from between his collapsing red lids, eyes that were empty.” As a “summer girl,” she is temporary, young, untouched by the years of exhaustion that shape the other women. Gambelli’s gaze is not filled with insult, nor with longing—just emptiness, as if she is not worth engaging with at all. This establishes a divide between the speaker and the older women; she is merely passing through, whereas they are tethered to this world.

The pivotal moment of humiliation follows: “Once I got stiffed on a check / when a man jerked out of his seat, craned around, then bolted / from those subterranean women, sweaty and crippled in the knees.” The man’s sudden flight, “craned around” as if terrified of something, suggests not just a desire to evade payment but an almost existential panic—perhaps at seeing the future embodied in the aging waitresses, at witnessing the wear and tear of time. His escape is an act of denial. The speaker, however, is not yet calloused: “Though I chased him up the stairs to the street, / the light outside was blinding and I lost the bastard / to that whiteness, and I betrayed myself with tears.” Her reaction—tears—marks her as still vulnerable, still taking things personally. The “blinding” light outside contrasts sharply with the dim world below, symbolizing the barrier between her current self and the hardened resilience of the older women.

But then, in a moment of transformation, she sees something new: “But coming back downstairs my eyes dried on another vision.” This marks a turning point—not in her circumstances, but in her perception. “I saw that the dusk trapped by the restaurant’s plastic greenery / was really some residual light of that brilliance happening above us on the street.” The artificial “plastic greenery” that decorates the restaurant is not just a cheap embellishment; it holds within it “some residual light” from the world outside. This realization—that even within this basement of toil, some trace of beauty remains—alters her understanding.

Then comes the most cinematic, almost surreal image of the poem: “Then for a moment the waitresses hung frozen in midstride— / cork trays outstretched—like wide-armed, reeling dancers.” The moment is fleeting, but it transforms these women from tired laborers into something almost ethereal—“wide-armed, reeling dancers.” In this instant, their work is not just drudgery but choreography, a continuous performance of balance and endurance. Their movements, usually routine and mechanical, become artful, momentarily suspended in grace.

The poem concludes with a poignant reflection: “the whole / some humming and benevolent machine that knew no past, no future— / only balanced glasses, and the good coin in the pocket.” The waitresses, for all their struggles, are part of a living, breathing system. There is no dwelling on past hardship, no anxious anticipation of the future—only the immediate, practical concerns of keeping the trays steady and earning their wage. In this space, time does not weigh them down; they exist fully in the present.

The final details are saturated with nostalgia: “Sinatra was singing ‘Jealous Lover.’ All of us were young.” The mention of Sinatra—a voice of romance and longing—casts a melancholic glow over the scene. The phrase “All of us were young” is particularly haunting. It is both a literal truth (the speaker was young at the time) and an illusion—an attempt to momentarily extend that youth to the older waitresses, to preserve the vision of them as “dancers” rather than aging laborers. Yet, underneath this line, there is the unspoken reality: time does not hold still, and the moment of grace is just that—a moment.

"First Job" is a poem of initiation, a recognition of labor’s wear and tear, but also of its resilience. The speaker’s first real encounter with work is not just about serving food—it is about witnessing the weight of time on women’s bodies, about encountering male disdain and longing in equal measure, about understanding how money dictates movement, dignity, and survival. But the poem does not leave us in despair. In the final vision, there is beauty amid exhaustion, a fleeting sense that, for one instant, everyone was weightless, timeless, and young.

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