Inversion

When I was a teenager my stepdad
took me to the abandoned mill across
a railroad truss bridge on the Mon. Conveyer
belts. Nozzles. Blow pipes lining the blast furnaces
like rusted musical staffs and bars. At school
the field trip to the river is cancelled.
There’s an inversion—warm air and the city’s
hills trap pollution around us like a blanket.
Room mothers, gathering their coats, whisper
about the toxic air: nitrogen oxides,
sulfur dioxide, arsenic, benzene, carbon
monoxide, lead and mercury, particle
pollution and the plant in Clairton
that produces coke for blast furnaces.

An inversion: when air
near the ground becomes cooler
than the air above it, it doesn’t rise.
In music, when all the expected notes
are there but the order
has changed. What if we inverted
the city? Put white folks’ housing
closest to the blast furnaces, smokestacks,
garbage incinerators, hazardous-waste landfills, toxic
waste dumps. What if we inverted
the past and this inheritance
was made for us
centuries ago? Pollution like a blanket.
Like a smallpox blanket. For whom
is it safe to breathe?
The day my stepdad took me to the mill
he placed a penny on the tracks.
When we crossed the bridge
toward home I found it flattened. It was illegal
to go there. Illegal to flatten
the penny—Lincoln’s
face. These things belong
to the state.

Emily Carlson is the author of Majestic Cut, forthcoming from Fernwood Press (2025), Why Misread a Cloud, selected by Kimiko Hahn for Tupelo Press’ 2022 Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Award, I Have a Teacher, selected by Mary Ruefle for The Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition (2016), and Symphony No 2 (Argos Books, 2015). Their writing has appeared in Aufgabe, Bloom, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, Vox Populi, and other places. Emily lives with their partner, the writer Sten Carlson, and their three children in an intentional community centered around an urban garden in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Published July 15 2024