As Long As

Angela Galik

When I said I’d never live there,
I meant not as long as those trucks
keep stomping down the back roads until they
break apart, trapping senior citizens’ sedans
in dusty crevasses – not as long as they’re pressing
thick liquids down into the Marcellus Shale, cracking
the basements of the mountains and opening up
sinkholes into which ancestral homes fall.
I only mean that as long as old ladies on social
security sell their pain pills to their grandchildren,
who don’t have jobs either, to pay the gas bill
while sitting rooms tilt and sofas slide
as mine shafts long disowned slowly collapse,
rock returning to rock – I won’t be back.
As long as the gritty dollars of miners’ baby boomer kids
leach out of schools like bromide into the Allegheny,
as long as syringes keep turning up on the sidewalk,
as long as doctors carry tiny Bibles into check­ups
and frighten people’s mothers, herbalists, energy workers,
with threats of eternal void – the cold of loneliness
neverending; as long as there’s nowhere to meet girls,
nowhere to rest and nowhere to wake up,
as long as the Dragon of Appalachia slumbers,
I’ll never move back home.

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