ONCE I WAS TOLD THE AIR
WAS NOT FOR BREATHING
Poems by Paola Corso
With Introduction by Michele Fazio and Michelle M. Tokarczyk
(University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2012)
Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award
MAKE ROOM FOR A NEW FELLER HAND
hunchbacked on a stool
felling coats for fourteen hours
sitting so close to each other
she smells their breath on her face
she feels the heat of their bodies
hands too numb to know
the prick of a needle
eyes so close to the coat
she sees the fire in each stitch
on her thimble and scissors
on the needles she stuck
in the lapel of her coat
that morning before work,
she breathes sweating bodies
she breathes black cloth dust
she breathes the odor of open toilets
she breathes the fire in each stitch
she breathes in, she breathes in
CRANE DANCE
in memory of Francesco Antonio Corso
I.
My grandfather's crane
spanning fire
long-necked long-legged
teething moldten bone
He rides
with a sweatband above his brow
stroking its mechanical head
to drop white hot ingots into a trolley
He rides
its flexion in crackled air
to machine through
nightshiftingnight
II.
My grandfather's crane
spanning fire
long-necked long-legged
teething moldten bone
as he become one of those
predictions of science*
In my dream he doesn't die
I fold a thousand origami cranes
and he rides in a vim
of courtship dance, pairs of birds
whisk their wings and vault the air
high above the wintering ground
*The poem's reference is to the University of Pittsburgh School of Public
Health's study on the relationship between a steelworker's exposure to
cancer-causing agents and their mortality rate. What researchers found
was that the risk of lung cancer, leukemia, and other cancers was higher.
My grandfather was a crane operator at Allegheny Ludlum Steel in Brackenridge,
Pa for 47 years before retiring. He dided of leukemia in 1966.
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