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The Chorus at the Pit
- Southern Illinois University Press
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40 The Chorus at the Pit Our last bruised apple rolls among the hard onions. Our memory is a refrigerator box upside-down in the grass: our castle. Even last week, when our uncle said his friend owns Thomas Edison’s voice, we could imagine it, stored between a silver spoon collection and a row of shot glasses stamped with London or empty beach chairs. So we have our canvas bags stuffed with plaster masks and decaying horseshoe crabs— each hollow rib cage crusted in sand grains—and the last white houses standing, vacant, in Centralia, Pennsylvania, wreathed in smoke like early morning fog settling on fence tips, where to get rid of garbage someone threw a match in a trash pit, igniting an anthracite vein. Fire races through underground mines. Roads buckle above ground, fold into earth so poisoned that most people flee. Even the government has given up, ignoring coal crevices, caves, the flames spreading wild for miles. Enormous heart. The trees are ruined. We see barren soil exhale shawls of gauze. We breathe the vapor. Our signs read Collapse. ...