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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3686 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention The Anatomy of Dreams Jim Doss In the noon heat, the steel rails shimmer and seem to rise above pitch-soaked crossties. Maple leaves lift on the far side of the tracks and wave their hands in a light breeze. The James ripples seaward in its muddy splendor, the same rusty brown as the freight cars that rest on it's banks awaiting cargo. In hardhat and steel-toed boots, I watch forklifts loading crated engine blocks bound for Detroit, Ohio, and Ontario, the final shine put on by grinders and pressurized blasts of fine sand. I see the hours of our work coupled together in a procession that lurches forward with the loud sigh of air brakes being released and the strain of the locomotive shaking off inertia to make it's way out of town— hundreds of hours marked by the bruises and burns it took to go from the giant magnet lifting scrap iron into a smelter to the orange glow of hot castings shaken from their sandy molds as smoke billows around us like lava touching the ocean. We sculpt our afternoons, evenings and mornings into steel to be packaged in wooden boxes and shipped places we've never seen, even those hours when we lie down, bone-weary from the day's work to close our eyes and fly from these bodies. |
