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| Paola Corso's fiction and poetry books are set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mill. Her writing honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, and recognition on The Pennsylvania Center for the Book's Literary and Cultural Map. Corso's new poetry books are The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the 2012 Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing from the Working Class Studies Association, and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, featuring Pittsburgh steelworkers and garment workers in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and in sweatshops today. Currently a lecturer in Chatham University's Low-Residency MFA Program, Corso is a poetry editor for The Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Social Justice's NewPeople and a "Greening Your Bookshelf" columnist for Group Against Smog and Pollution in Pittsburgh. More info at http://www.paolacorso.com/ |
Once I Was Told the Air
Was Not for Breathing
I held my breath and counted backwards
until my lungs began sucking in
my body instead of the air
that was not for breathing
if I were to be particular
about the particulates and I
could and I was and I had to
for myself and for the memory
of the twenty in the smog
who blued from asphyxiation,*
waiting for a 130-pound tank of oxygen
strapped on somebody's
back, lugged
from house to house in darkness,
puffing them up with a little purity
and then gone for another who was
just as particular about the particulates,
the sulfur, carbon monoxide, heavy
metal dust trapped in the river valley
and I imagined all this as my lungs
inhaled my face and neck and chest
then my stomach, legs and feet
until I was all inside myself
and I took one look at my lungs
the sponge that was now a board
with no give no take
the color of an oil slick
the song of a worm
and I wanted out.
Author's Note: In October 1948, 20
people were killed from the smoke and fumes of the zinc
and iron works in Donora, 28 miles
south of Pittsburgh in the first known American deaths from air pollution.
Paola Corso, Once
I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing
(University of Wisconsin's Parallel Press,
2012)
© Copyright, 2014,
Paola
Corso.
All rights reserved.