Madge - revised

[svanhoeven]

I really like the ideas and images here, but it still has a lot of room for compression. My suggestions are below, but as tectak likes to say, your poem.

Hot! Oil seeps out of the asphalt road
and cars make a sticky noise as they pass by
sounding like fat people sex on a hot night.
Clunk. "Sounding" is superfluous due to "noise" on the previous line; maybe "like fat lovers on a hot night"
At the bus stop is a woman with
tumbleweed blown straw-blond hair,
suggestion: "At the bus stop- a woman coiffed
with a straw-blond tumbleweed,"
I'm not sure, though, if by "tumbleweed-blown" you mean it looks like a tumbleweed.
lips painted like a freshly cut pink neon fig,
You make it sound like the fig is painted too, plus the modifier for pink should precede it. Maybe "her painted lips a freshly-cut neon-pink fig,"
and deep crevices carved in pasty skin
from years of negligent living.
There's something about deep crevices and pasty skin that seems incongruous, maybe because the women I see that look like they were "rode hard and put up wet" tend to be leathery from the sun, not pasty. Then there are those women who trowel on their foundation.


There's a lot of potential here for combining this with the above section, i.e the gist of it would be, "negligent living...you're soaking in it!"
She reminds me of the Palmolive
dish-wash soap manicurist,
Palmolive IS dish-wash soap, so:
"She reminds me of the Palmolive manicurist,"
so I'm thinking her name might be
Madge...Not a name you hear much now.
That was from a time when if you were cool
you rolled your Lucky's up in the sleeve
suggestion: "you rolled up your Lucky's in the sleeve"
of your tight white cotton shirt,
wielded a Zippo like a samurai sword,
and lit two, one for you and one for her.

She has that look like she's done a year
or two in what they call jail these days.
Nothing like the jail on the
Andy Griffith Show where
Above 2 lines maybe compressed to:
Nothing like the Mayberry jail where
Otis, the town drunk, slept it off
then let himself out the next morning.
No one was letting Madge out
through those double vault doors
after her last bender, when she
smashed her fender into that street light.


She's obviously on the way to work;
I think "obviously" is superfluous, but if you really like the idea, "clearly" has a better rhythm.
wearing the ubiquitous medium-dark
If you say "standard uniform" below, "ubiquitous" is unneeded here, plus you could stand to trim the modifier list anyway.
brown knit knee length dress that serves
as the standard uniform
for servitors in such places
I think you can trim this whole line, i.e.:
as the standard uniform
in the occupational cleaning industry
as the occupational cleaning industry
and chain cafeterias like Luby's where they
monotonously repeat their zombie phrases
a thousand times a day,

“hep ya”, “moe tea”, and “cum’gin” *
I know this has been beaten to death, but "moe tea" doesn't sound right to me unless this in the deep south, such as Georgia, where you would expect a non-rhotic accent. I think you mentioned elsewhere this was Texas, where I would expect an exaggerated rhotic accent that sounds like "mower tea".

while serving their purgatory on earth,
but it's hard for a felon to get a job these days.

I can see through the heat distortion
swirling up from the earth
I picture a heat distortion more as a shimmer than a swirl.
acting as a convection oven,
that she's firing up a cigarette,
and I wonder how someone like her
can afford to smoke, when a pack cost
the equivalent of two hours of work.
suggestion: "when a pack costs two hours work"
Well, I guess you just find a way
when it is a matter of life and death!