Love Canal

Like honeymoon, like valentine—words evoking a papery kind
of romance. Love Canal, like a carnival ride, little gondolas

idling under a bridge of roses. Like a lake inhabited by a pair
of white swans, their necks arched in the shape of a heart.

There was once a man named Love, a chemical corporation
called Hooker. A schoolyard built on caustic hydrocarbons—

kids dangling from monkey bars, digging a tunnel to China,
their hands and faces rashed in spasms of Superfund pink.

On front lawns, housewives cut clusters of hydrangeas
to be arranged in crystal vases, floated in poison water.

Men in after-work T-shirts change the oil in their Fords
and Chevrolets, letting the excess seep into driveway cracks,

and the cat leaves a mouse, already dead, at the back door.
Soon, birds will fall from the trees. Broken eggs will litter

the grass like shell casings. The sunrises here have always
looked a little different, don’t you think, and the sunsets.