Broken Rose
Photo by Sylvia Kniss
Centralia
by: Sydney Greiner
There is a song that rises from the bellies of our mine shafts,
wafting up like smoke through broken asphalt.
They think it is thick like fog,
thick like coal dust,
thick like the mucus of black lung.
The Blessed Virgin Mary still holds a silent mass
next to the windmills we built for forgiveness.
Congregational tongues lick at the wounds of
our men, who sung in the caverns that imprisoned their souls,
wishing to return.
And still, the creeks run orange.
So, I think of Centralia,
the way the gravestones are not yet worn,
the way the weeds grow around them–
curtaining lineage from prying eyes,
about how we are all sinners when fish die downstream.
I think of how it only ends when we have nowhere else to call home.