Patchwork of milk-glass, celadon, amber,
broken panes boot-blacked in the derelict brick.
When I dreamed it as a child, I called it the shoe factory.
Could feel the long lines of women seated within,
bent to their sepia stitching, the pierced scent of glue:
a building for piecework. My aunt at Goodyear,
forty years in that viscous air. Asbestos filaments
silting into Eddie’s lungs, gone at 32. My father
pulling double shifts at Ford for half his life.
The plant, he called it, which meant to stay put.
The factory stands in a field of scrub prairie
and ghost stones, moonlit fork of a river, parking lot
thistle-split. I’ve dreamed it for decades, resolute
edifice planted within, broken pattern of its windows
a cipher, a sentence I’ve tried to write away.
Once, when I wrote about my father at work, roar
of forges and presses, bright slivers of brass
in his hair, my teacher said Like a god.
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POETRY: Issue 35