Rubber
Passing the tire factory on the way
to school I’d move through pockets of haunted air,
the sudden warmth of unseen hands would part
across my face, wrist bones of smoke twisting
away. This is my fate, I’d think, only half
hating it, how my life was caught up
in machinery I’d heard yet never seen,
that constant comforting whir behind
painted-over windows. Across the street
in class I’d read about the honey-cured
flesh of pharaohs, the green glow that spilled
from the lab of Madame Curie, but still
nothing changed, even Giza and Paris
reeked with fumes of burning rubber.
Karina Borowicz’s forthcoming book, The Bees Are Waiting, was selected by Franz Wright for the 2011 Marick Press Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in AGNI, Poetry Northwest and The Southern Review.
I like the layers to this — the half-hating, the creepy sensuality of “wrist bones of smoke” and honey as embalming fluid, the “even Giza and Paris.”