Poem Published in North American Review

Scrap Iron


We hunted for steel along flat-bottom train rails--glass
_____blanketing the gravel track bed like chickenfeed,
jimsonweed weed stalks between creosote-steeped timbers--
_____picked over buckled trailers and garbage stacks:
cracked pump heads, mower blades, band saws rusted mid-cut.
_____The clang of spikes and bolt heads lobbed into a bucket
was a lesson he taught me in milking the wasted land.

Those days were oil tanks chain-dragged home
_____on the city road; rotting doors charred in our backyard
so that I could rake the hinges and metal from the ash.
_____Those days were broken appliances I held down
while he tore off the unwanted plastic and rubber gaskets.

Evenings, my father exhausted the fridge's thirty-rack
_____one beer at a time and reviewed the math of cents per pound
as I swatted away drones that hummed from wasps' nests
_____in the trashed air conditioner's A-coil, in and out
of the mouths of empties I crumpled under my heel.
_____I refastened the flapping sole of hand-me-down boots
with screws plundered from a pool scrubber head.
_____The tiny spirals shined in my palm like loose change.

His long weekends off and the truck bed crammed full, wreck
_____balanced and roped, we drove across town to cash in.
"Don't let them see you when we get weighted on the drive in,"
_____he warned me, balled below te glove box, hiding under
work shirts and newspapers, palms cupped over mouth
_____masking my breathing until we made the junkyard's jagged heap.

Knowing that we'd make an extra forty-five bucks if I
_____wasn't in the truck during weight out, I snuck
my way around the hissing hydraulic compactors, hustled past
_____the growling machines and grease-tanned forklift drivers.
I kept my hands in my pockets and thought about what was worse:
_____if one of the dump workers found me, or the look on my father's
face if they did--how if I didn't get caught, my body
_____an extra hundred and twenty some pounds of scrap.