Industrial Gothic

BY Chris Forhan

What we motored past to arrive
at this meadow, this light, this dew
cooling our feet before steaming
into oblivion in the June sun —

what we saw at dusk, smutting
the sky: the rust-glutted ironworks,
tanks and stacks and scuttles, cathedral
of fetor and soot, self-blessed
by waste: a bilious stew
oozing from boilers into grated drains
(whose ghost stokes the flames?) —
factory smelting beauty
to a rancid slag, the stench of which
we can’t burn from our brains,

we who imagined the place to begin with,
we who adore it and are desolate.

 

Biography

CHRIS FORHAN is the author of three books of poetry: Black Leapt In (Barrow Street Press, 2009), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (Northeastern University Press, 2003), winner of the Morse Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award; and Forgive Us Our Happiness (Middlebury, 1999), winner of the Bakeless Prize. He has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry. He lives with his wife, the poet Alessandra Lynch, and their two sons in Indianapolis, where he teaches at Butler University.

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