Love Canal
by Wenli Dickinson
Quite simply, Love Canal is one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history. It is a cruel irony that Love Canal was originally meant to be a dream community. . . . By 1910, the dream was shattered. . . . In the 1920s the seeds of a genuine nightmare were planted. The canal was turned into a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite.
—Eckardt C. Beck, EPA Journal, 1979
There is a place I want to take you.
It is where the birds go to roost,
and the water is blue as blue can be.
Where we inject love, softly.
A needle under skin, and it
shivers down the river banks.
Where each tree and spring will become
the lacquered pine threshold
and the chlorinated pools I will build for you.
Each tributary is that vein,
from cephalic to carotid to heart.
From black furnace to lung.
Where every day is the music
of our choosing. I will build you
great theaters and microphones.
The fish, they breathe toxins, too.
They and us in vitro. We want to see
how tough love can hurt.
Where you can breathe tomorrow,
the oxygen tank by your side. I will engrave
endearment in the language of binary.
Love’s harvest is bountiful.
The fish practically leap into basket.
We pick their bleached bones from teeth.
There is a place I want to take you.
It is where the birds used to roost,
and the water was as blue as blue could be.
Wenli Dickinson is water resources engineer with an M.A. in hydrology and a B.A. in environmental engineering with a minor in creative writing. She has been a poetry reader for both the Winter Tangerine Review and Transcendence Magazine and was a poetry editor, and editor-in-chief for the literary arts journal, High Grade. Her poem, "How to Hold It So You Can Hear It," was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.