Birmingham, Alabama, in operation from 1882-1970
I feel like Gretel here: lost in this wildwood of rusted machinery, skimming paint flakes,
like bits of loosed mascara, off sun-baked gears and wheels and cogs.
Ladders. Catwalks. Sinuous teal pipes mazing around hard-toiled steel.
Boilers budding like carrot-colored wildflowers. All sensuous infrastructure.
Chains dangle from ceilings: errant branches in an industrial forest. Who worked here?
Convicts (whose dark luck led, like breadcrumbs, to this voltage cottage),
trading one slavery for another while Birmingham lapped from the basin of this iron
giant. Their sweat still monograms the ground. If I stare long enough, regard hard enough
its splattered patterns spell out, howl out, Save me. I can hear the damage
to their windpipes from years of yelling over the noise and bang of boilers. I am spoiled
in my modern domain. I live in comfort, my coiling whims sated by anonymous machinists,
stove-tenders, boiler-makers, greased and smutched with slag.
I walk this abandoned furnace yard, my body reacting to these manufactured monoliths,
cobwebbed architecture, pressure valves blazing in the sun, the broad-bodied boilers,
the plumbing and its roiling liquids, the blast furnaces and know this hard fact—
my hands have crafted nothing.
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Michelle McMillan-Holifield is a recent Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. Her work has been included in or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Jabberwock Review, Sky Island Journal, Sleet Magazine, Stirring, The Collagist, Whale Road Review, and Windhover, among others. She hopes you one day find her poetry tacked to a tree somewhere in the Alaskan Wild.