Poetry by Lauren Kardos

     Shawn Kent CC





Steel 

Another lesson I’ve got for yinz. One syllable makes our manufacturing miracle, but it wouldn’t be the ‘Burgh if we speak our mascot as written. You must stamp it short. Cull the ending. Rhyme it with its place of birth -- mill. Take a ride on the Duquesne incline, the S and T our keyword’s peak, but let each L to leap from Mt. Washington, the ending wrought and sudden. Still. In this neck of Appalachia we euthanize our E’s but keep our A’s on hospice. Out here, we brunch by retired smelters, listen for the trains whistling of lighter loads, and stroll by tarnished factory plaques inhaling air fresh and sting-free. Carnegie plastered high and low, we can’t ever forget our benefactor, see. Did you know the Panama Canal functions yet thanks to locks of Pittsburgh steel? Did you know steel from our sticks built the NYC skyline of old? My exile’s self-imposed, but lately I’ve pined to return home. My ironclad reserve might crack, still. 




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Nuked  

We nuke dollar store popcorn packets for four minutes instead of five so our teeth won’t canary yella. Our enamel glows like ceiling sticker stars at midnight, and still them reporters don’t care and those dentists scrape quickly past our starlight chips n’ cracks. Irradiation is trendy, babe, since our rivers became the primordial dumping ground. Two minutes. Grandma nukes the frozen bread from that organic store an hour away. Grampa, more tubes ‘n needles than man, says it don’t taste so much like cardboard that way. Sugar feeds the tumors, all them doctors say, like they forget the factory decorated our backyards in sweet cake (uranium). Thirty seconds. American cheese slabs on leftover hamburg patties nuke toward melty magazine-ad perfection. Us kids hunt n’ gather in coughing fridges, no night shift Dads or infusion-sick Moms to supervise. We pray at the church of bumblebees, priests mumbling forgiveness to our hospice rattles, our half-lives halved again. We preach and pray for the capital U ‘til our cells decay. Slap another exposé in the newspapers, honey, still those city slickers won’t know how to make a microwave sing --



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Lauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. The Molotov Cocktail, Spry Literary Journal, hex, Bending Genres, Best Microfiction 2022, and The Lumiere Review are just a few of the fine publications that feature her stories and poems. You can find more of her work at www.laurenkardos.co and say hello on Twitter @lkardos.