The Night Manifest
Cargo Terminal, Shift Three
The forklifts hum their lullabies
beneath the sodium glare.
The manifest says HUM. REMAINS.
Some crate is waiting there.
Flight landed late, the tower said,
a stranger from afar.
It rolled in sealed and zinc-lined,
stamped with a foreign star.
We tag it, scan it, shelve it,
and the clock says half past two.
The cold room’s door is breathing,
though no wind could carry through.
The loaders swear the temperature
drops five degrees by dawn
around the shelf where he is kept,
the one whose papers are gone.
A man named Joe, now twenty years
upon the graveyard shift,
will never face the Bay Four door
without a wary lift
of eyes, because the crate he logged
came in with six, left with five,
and no one on the paperwork
could say who stayed alive.
The scanner beeps at empty air.
The pallet jack rolls slow.
The seals we checked at midnight
are all broken, row on row.
Somewhere in the freezer’s hush
a tag-tied toe still tries
to count the hours it’s been shipped
and never once arrived.
They say the dead just want to go
back home, and so they wait,
reading every label twice,
on the wrong side of the gate.
And if you hear your name called out
in a voice you almost know,
from a pallet wrapped in plastic,
don’t you answer. Let it go.
Just clock the hour, sign the sheet,
and keep your eyes in line.
The dead have long to travel
and they’ve learned to take their time.
When dawn at last unlocks the doors
and the day crew shuffles in,
they’ll ask why you’re so pale and still
and why your hands are thin.
Don’t tell them what you saw tonight
beside the Bay Four wall.
The manifest was one short,
and one more is on the call.
Posted at 10 pm. Somewhere, a night shift is just beginning.
*an AI assisted poem
*an AI assisted poem
