Poetry

From Issue V (2020)

Coal Country Paradise

by MICHAEL GARRIGAN

Centralia, PA

The graffiti highway cratered with smoke potholes
knuckles through a town turned graveyard back in ’62.
Snow lines ridges, the Main Street crease stays
clear from a constant heat pulse. 120 over 80, steady.

We fade in ash of iron stains and sulfur
tattoos falling from subterranean fires,
an industrial afterlife of fractured asphalt,
bleeding orange mountain veins.

A new world will grow from our collapse into a coal country paradise
as we slowly compress into a new geological layer. Maybe, in a few
thousand years, they will find our fossils and conjecture that we lived
in the dark eating styrofoam, breathing coal smoke and drinking
water from traffic cones, our bones bent to our faces as we fell
in love with the acidic elixir of silica benzene and mercury.

Admiring a night’s work, My Yard, Minnesota | MARTHA NANCE
*Digital photography, 2019*

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Michael Garrigan

Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the banks of the Susquehanna River. He is the author of Robbing the Pillars and What I Know [How to Do]. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Drake Magazine, Permafrost Magazine, Split Rock Review, and elsewhere.

Martha Nance

Martha Nance is a physician and weekend nature photographer in Minnesota who is particularly fascinated by the twenty-five or so species of dragonflies she has seen in her neighborhood. Her photographs have appeared in The Esthetic Apostle and Tiny Seed Literary Journal.