It’s working all of us, and all the time. Not just
as obvious obsessions with diagnostic names,
the car-horn ones you notice corralling someone else

as you avert your eyes. Don’t be coy. Punding
hums to you and me. Collect. Arrange. My mother
took up figurines, blaming the Depression for her want.

Myself, I go by color, size, or function for my stuff.
The superego interrupts: “In this implicit way,
are you not sorting people with a glance?”

Eric Forsbergh’s poetry has appeared in Streetlight, Artemis, JAMA, The Northern Virginia Review, The Journal of Neurology, and multiple other venues. He has twice won the Edgar Allen Poe Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia. A retired health care worker, he is a Vietnam veteran, and a recent graduate of the majority-Black seminary The John Leland Center in Arlington, Va. In 2021 he was a volunteer COVID vaccinator for his community in Leesburg, Va.