Joseph Bathanti: Steady Daylight
Today in Heaven,
my father turned 105.
Finally working steady daylight
Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Street Art in Pittsburgh
Although Pittsburgh is home to a number of major museums and art galleries, the region’s streets often tempt residents to create their own art.
Audio: Jack Gilbert reads his poems
Reading poems from The Great Fires, some of them in earlier versions, Jack Gilbert looks back on the loves and solitudes of a life lived acutely, seen in terms of the Pittsburgh steel mills where he worked as a youth
Mel Packer: The Bend on the River Road from Homestead
A falling down, bullet-pocked sheet metal wall
Once erected to mark the edges of the
South Side Jones and Laughlin steel mill
Sharon Fagan McDermott: On Time Passing
I wander through the rusting bulk
of Carrie Furnace and reach toward the ghosts of
Eastern European men who worked with fire
and molten ore for pennies a day to build the Empire
Jason Irwin: Smoke Rising
Back then to see dark clouds of smoke
rising above the housetops meant that God, in his wisdom and mercy,
was still on our side.
Kristofer Collins: A Poem for Michael Wurster
The only connection I felt to the mills
was to the children of a generation of flayed men
on unemployment, the storefronts boarded…
Sharon Fagan McDermott: Carrie Furnace, Pittsburgh
The light is water driven through old gears and red lights sweep the streets looking for the lost while flaking brick simmers in itself like stew, and black graffiti … Continue reading
Robert Gibb: Worker, Steel Mill
Photograph by W. Eugene Smith, c. 1955 . Bug-eyed in those glare-filled goggles, He’s gauntleted and cassocked, garbed To be garbed in fire, which forms a lake On the floor … Continue reading
Robert Gibb: Deskulling the Slag Pots
i. You’d see them in the railyard, Coupled and waiting in line To be topped off with that cargo Tapped from the blast furnaces: Magma they’d freight nightly Along … Continue reading
Emily De Ferrari: In the Belly
1. In Aliquippa The mill loomed large and after dark, nightmarishly glowing red on the river road we would take before I was five to my grandmother’s sweet, warm and yeasty … Continue reading
