All over the air was yellow.
Brown sky; spilling poison plumes.
I thought the stacks were pretty.
At the rim of the lake:
dead algae, dead shrimp,
decaying birds half-preserved,
oozing puddles of rotten flies.
Summer winds carried the stink.
Everywhere, the air hung poison.
In church, the doors stayed open,
so it came inside. My forehead
resting on a cool wood pew;
long cotton skirt; mother nursing the baby.
It burned, but then you forgot.
Children gulp big lungfuls
—we didn’t know
how it would enter our bodies
and remain inside, changing us, too.
Image: Great Salt Lake from plane by David Herrera, licensed under CC 2.0.
Holli Carrell currently lives, writes, and teaches in Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her writing has appeared in Salt Hill, Bennington Review, Quarterly West, Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, The Florida Review, and other places. She has received support from the NY State Summer Writers Institute and is a graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Hunter College, where she was a recipient of the Colie Hoffman Poetry Prize and a Norma Lubetsky Friedman Scholarship.