Taking Stock
you know what you can always use
as an excuse is the recession
you can always say “it’s really hard
graduating into a recession”
and everyone has to nod
really seriously like they totally
know what that means. I don’t like to brag
about this, but I’ve actually graduated
into two recessions and each time
I grow a little more powerful
like I learn how to avoid its pitfalls
such as people posting ponzi schemes
about sending around books, where you
send one book out and get thirty-six
back, or people posting riddles that
if you don’t get right, you’ve gotta
reshare, or else ten zillion years
of bad luck or shame on main or
whatever. As a genius, you know
what I did upon graduating
into a recession, was go to work
for a business school. Working for the
business school, I learned a lot about
business, such as the fact that in
academia they pronounce the
word finance: finánce
I have worked for the business school for
some months now and I still don’t know what
investors do on a day-to-day
basis. Much of my job on a day-
to-day basis involves writing alt
text. I write alt text for stock images
titled things like tree-grows-on-pile-of-
coins-with-human.jpg
I describe this photo by saying
something like “Four progressively tall
stacks of coins sit on a desk, with
increasingly large trees sitting atop
them, each the size of progressively
larger bugs, still small enough to fit
atop a coin, and a line graph glowing
above. A person poises the final
tree above the largest stack of coins,
and in their other hand wields a pen
and taps a keyboard. Their shirt, in the
background, is white.” For this I am
able to pay my rent, within the
recession. Sometimes I wonder what
I would do if I had instead
graduated into a booming
economy. Perhaps I would be having
a baby, or perhaps I would have
a job as a bard, you know, like Shakespeare?
I’d just walk around the Philly streets
telling my little tales in verse,
a babe in my robust arms, and I’d
never consider crass things like
money or little trees or graphs, I
would never recede into the space
between a desk and a metal filing
cabinet. However, one piece of
wisdom I’ll provide for those of you
who might one day, like me, graduate
into recession, is to stock up
on stock images—get them in all
kinds of coins, horizons, trees, smokestacks
hard hats, sunsets, hands, desks, clouds, and
blazers, so when the recession comes
you too will be prepared to describe
generic scenes around you with the
intended effect of being able
to pay rent, and you too can describe
Picture,Female,Hand,Touching,Modern,
Tablet.investment.Manager.Working,
New,Private.jpeg in as many
details as humanly possible
within the space allotted. Or
instead if you are unhappy with
the way things are going in your life,
you can just shrug it off, recede
into the background of whichever
stock image looks like it’s got the most
thriving economy with the most
opportunities to provide for
your happiness and your baby’s also
(if you want that), and if you squint
really hard, maybe you’ll spot me back
there, in the blurred out scene, barding up
a smokestack.jpg storm
as the image recedes
toward the fuzzy point
at the end,
of the end,
of the
horizon
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo lives in Philadelphia, where she curates the reading and open mic series Spit Poetry. She is the author of the poetry chapbook "DUH" (Bullshit Lit) and her work appears or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Offing, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, and The Cleveland Review of Books, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy (Instagram) and @tall__spy (Twitter) but she can never be caught.