The Night Manifest

 

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