ibeam

steel rolled out of marsh grass
spanning miles rising stories
web and flange
ground substance
bones tissue bound
arteries recoiling
hands on scaffold
keep us
twist bend and shear

brownfield after sunrise
(wilbur ross bought sparrows point from bethlehem steel in 2003, sticking taxpayers with money owed to workers and stiffing workers out of contracted health insurance)

counter-current realty

fields of ore
slowly rain down coked solar fire updraft
roaring chamber explosion music
softening
exhaling
pooling separate
bleeding trickle into veins
tendriling opiate through biomass
automatrons harvest
feeding engineerimmortal dreams

former steel mill at sunrise
(the 32-story l-blast furnace at sparrows point started operating in 1975—and was demolished in 2015)

professor shitwater

me thy sanitizer
put shit in thy harbor
me thy onedollarman
put ironsulfur in thy lungs
me thy envirosultant
put cyanibenzene in thy cells
very few harbors in the world are clean
yup its raining dollars
my purse is around here somewhere

brownfields at sunrise
(abel wolman propped up industrial polluters with pseudoscience and shared greed, earning more than the city from his 1940 scheme to sell lightly-treated city sewage to bethlehem steel for industrial use and subsequent dumping into the patapsco—harbor area groundwater had already been depleted and polluted)