Before the Closure, Before I Quit
Pulling “burn-offs,” Porkshit yelled “what a hell
of a way to make a living,”
his pants and gloves smoldering,
neck goiter beating red as Bling’s bandanna
and face. We looked like prisoners
while we tonged carbon shards
glowing over open molten. Our factory
became a sucker fish in the swelling world
operation. So they fed us cheaper
ingredients, alumina ore cut thin as soup,
which we processed with our red
Sqwinchers, mined from our filling gutters,
shook from thinning hairlines,
and swept from our dirty sheets at night,
before rising again for Graveyard.
Toxins settle down inside us
like faded coins in a piggy bank.
Before the “Year of the Burn-off,”
before Haystack printed SOPs
and tallied the OSHA “Recordables,”
before I hung upside down
by my broken leg, trapped in the bus-work
on Pot 22, long before the crustbreaker
crushed the tractor, and the train cars
crushed a millwright, before
Piglos crushed stolen pills
from lunch pails and smoked his teeth—
an open-cab crane operator by mistake
crushed a hydraulic line while syphoning
aluminum, dousing himself in oil
and flames, before Poor Vern’s legend dropped
the ladder, climbed down all thirty-five feet
and years, muttering his final words to the crew,
“what a hell of a way to go out.”
High on Coke and Mushrooms at a Black Jack Table, 2 a.m.
Screaming along a darkening highway
the igneous rocks have faces
And the driver grins fantastic grins
too wide for good,
razor teeth and shooting stars for eyes,
Hit me again, I tell the dealer
inside my head
inside a Medieval-themed casino,
clutching a Camel like a prayer.
Two vices clench my thoughts
racing blind horses on the widening TV screen
before Freebase Eric answers, he’s with me
Temple Grandin whispers in Alaskan creole
there’s a bear drinking a Coke
that shits on the floor
And roars back at the hungry crowd
As florescent lights heat the bathroom floor
glistening vomit and blood stains
that pattern my new face and the broken tile decaying
Is someone there? wearing yellow diamonds
she asks though we both know
like the lengthening future’s luster
The black radio’s spheric answer
Croc’s Bib, Graffiti Portrait on Plastic Dispenser for Disposable Toilet-Seat Covers
In memory of Joseph “Croc” Czlapinski, 1963-2018
Not two years past the shutdown
mesothelioma ate your lungs.
Chain-smoker-skinny
drinker, stalker, angler,
lazy union brother,
those scratchy-throated stories
could outlive trashy ex-wives,
restraining orders
and teenage twins, who never saw you
there, standing next in line.
Will I make it to sixty? I wonder now
approaching the ManorCare bathroom’s mirror,
while my own twin brother smokes
outside in the parking-lot rain,
and our stranger-father tries to swallow spit
past a baseball-size throat tumor.
Facebook wishes you a Happy Birthday, Croc.
They wonder how you got your name.
Bragging in a filthy breakroom
you bent your knees to show us
how you pulled that “gator” from glowing liquid
bath, floating the red channel,
so monstrous in the molten aluminum
it had to be a crocodile! The same one
the whole shift knew, like you,
to be a flaming crock of shit.
Tomorrow I’ll Dream of Purple Flowers
Tonight I dream of purple bruises, climbing fast
above the ponderosa pines and Douglas fir
branches, tracing the miners’ dirt-road mountain pass,
past the asbestos layered roof tiles, the color
of clay that’s trapped in clenching fists, barely gripping
basalt and granite stones that line the turret walls,
beyond the factory and museum, extending
outside the sky in darkness. The purple crows call
to me as I’m slow-lifted up, and floating on,
and soaring out into a vastness that can’t be
described without inhaling the bright deception
of bauxite teeth and bones coating the stars, and me
clawing the air, filling with fear, now looking down,
stirring back to life and rising from the cold ground.
Alcoa Gothic
I wear multinational companies in my flesh.
– Adam Dickenson (“Anatomic”)
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take
but by the moments that take our breath away.
 – Picture frame from Walmart
The guard gates are closed tonight.
Fresh snow on concrete.
Uncle Al waits to be called
in, and I am waiting too,
for a black phone to ring.
A ghoulish reunion occurs underground.
In the distance my mind travels, I listen
for the speechmaker’s voice repeating
Manual Kill, Manual Kill.
Coal tar sticks to a trans-corporeal reality
far beyond the grave. At a long-dead
river smelter, a long-dead Potliner
is lobbing snowballs of powdered asbestos
at a Bricky’s rash-gnarled face.
I hear Tap Out, Pot Twenty-two,
Twenty-two. Box cars are loaded with ingots
for bullets. Croc chokes for air on the curtain wall
carrying his tongs to the next pot.
Over a crew of skeletons, Poor Vern
runs the air from the crane, charred
black and still smoking.
Hurricane Harold has no hands
for fist fighting in the courtyard. Twenty-two,
Twenty-three. New hires rise from ore piles,
alumina, silica, fluoride, coke
pouring from their ears,
mouth and eyes.
A supervisor with fangs and one arm
repeats into the dying radio’s static,
Roger that. The whole shift is getting forced
—while the Alcoa doctor says nothing
down here can kill you, Alcoa
Santa wishes you a Merry Christmas—over.
Audio for “Alcoa Gothic” features score by Nico Toe.
A former aluminum worker, Zach Eddy is currently earning his MFA at the University of Idaho, where he teaches English composition and serves as poetry editor for Fugue. He has been awarded the Wenatchee Valley College Earth Day Poetry Prize, a Centrum Writers’ Conference Fellowship from Central Washington University, and an honorable mention in the Academy of American Poets University and College Contest. His work has been published in High Desert Journal, Mirror Northwest, The Confluence, The Comet Magazine, NPR’s A Poetry Moment, and elsewhere.
Header photo by galitsin, courtesy Shutterstock.
