Five Poems about Air by Paola Corso

Paola Corso will be reading with the Group Against Smog and Pollution and the Battle of Homestead Foundation at the Bost Building in Homestead, Pennsylvania on Thursday October 31st at 6P.M.

HOW MUCH SUN

Trapped
valley air
particles form
clouds, the
river a long
dark sheet
reflecting
a sooty sky
or not reflecting at all
We don’t remember to miss
the sun we keep
looking down
and think we
see shadows

SATURDAY MORNING

Truth is I resented my weekly chore,
dusting
mill soot under my dresser doily,
on the windowsill, baseboard, and floor,
beneath
the corners of my desk blotter, using spit
and four-letter words with each glide over black specks
so fine
I couldn’t tell how dirty the surface was
until it soiled my white rag, an old T-shirt
my mother
cut and folded into squares.
I would rather have gone to the movies,
gone
to a football game, shopping
for a tighter pair of jeans or
darker
shade of nail polish. Truth is
my mother couldn’t have cared less that I
hated
cleaning my room every Saturday. She was
grateful because dust meant jobs—her father’s, my father’s,
in an industry
where the blacker the better, dust

of the angels, she said, but how could that be,
dust
from a demon fire.

AMERICAN FUTURE

Snapshot of my father as a young man
Standing at the top of hillside steps
wearing a double-breasted suit & tie
pants creased, shoes polished, his back
to the steel mill in the valley behind him,
his back to the jackhammer he used to drill
on the labor gang, its 60 pounds to his 145
the crane he operated in a sweat cabin
above a coal-fired furnace
his back to chain-smoking stacks
to chain-smoking beer gardens
to the jackass work he skipped one day
and when his father found out
he belted him before he told his son
“Mario, you better learn to use
your head and not your hands”
as he wore his white-collar best
striking a pose for the camera
feet anchored on higher ground
my father set his sights ahead
not a Pittsburgh mill, not his
Santo Procopio, not the steps
he climbed onto a boat crossing
the ocean in steerage herds

Steps where his mother led him up
by the hand, pushed him through
the classroom door each morning
a dago who couldn’t speak English
After high school, a job at the mill
up and down steps to punch in
with the rank and file, steps up to
a World War II fighter plane
to college, to a newspaper office
government office
school administration office
suit & tie office
What was my Italian father thinking
as he faced his American future
double-breasted for the camera,
what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t know
He turned his back on an immigrant past
but his cancer faced front—
dead center front
dead center lungs

A CIGARETTE BUTT ON A LANDING

Pick it up, toss it in the trash,
pretty up city stairs for an annual trek.
Years ago the same Camel
would have been flicked by a mill hunk
could have been my grandfather
could have been my father
taking his last drag as he climbed
down to the factory gate.
What did he care about clean steps
when he was a sooty shadow of a man
after his shift, pants and shirt the color
of a charcoal sky, the color of factory lungs.
Now trekkers climb a yellow brick road
for views, for snapshots, for exercise,
for a lighter carbon footprint when the bottom
of his steel toe boots was black, his soul heavy.
Now his daughter recites her poetry on a landing
to remember the city’s blue, celebrate it going green
To remember old-timers climbing steps before they were cool,
before they were the destination. They climbed

to church and school, to a haircut and soda pop.
And to a steel worker, steps were the route
to punch in and out, the route
he didn’t want to take except on payday.
To remember my grandfather’s last night shift
operating a crane before he retired,
my father and his brothers borrowed
a Cadillac and drove him home at sunrise.
He wasn’t gonna climb up no stairs
on his last day of work after 47 years
in a sweat cabin above open fire.
He came home to a pancake breakfast,
to maple syrup, strips of bacon, black coffee.
Home, an old destination. Home, a new route.

AIR WAVES

Who speaks for the air?
In wind whistles and taps
on the shoulder we remember
how the atmosphere
just hung there
dusking and dull
no wisps or curls
no heavenly swirls
bending the trees.
Think of those still
gasping, reaching
for who we are
if not for air.
Let it be a halo
circling our body.
Let us search
for its voice, a voice
we must set free
that’s pure and carries—
a sky that speaks for itself
a sky that breathes for us all

Excerpted from Oxygen for Two Copyright ©2026 by Paola Corso. Used with permission of the publisher, Bordighera Press. All rights reserved.