Living Grief
How
am I
supposed
to do
this?
Your rough hands
cup my shoulders
you hold me
a step away
then kiss me.
I know
every assault
working steel
made
to your body.
Pockmarks on
the top of your
hands
from scalds
of wet metal
Flesh under
your right forearm
puckered
by a slice of
sheet metal
Inner left thigh
a leathery map of
scar tissue
week-in-the-hospital
deep burn
Knees shot.
You loved
to run.
Now thoughts
run from you.
It wasn’t enough
working metal
beat your body
now steel robs me
of your mind.
Donna Wojnar Dzurilla’s poetry has appeared in the Backbone Mountain Review, Rune Literary Journal, and the anthology, The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain: Pittsburgh Poems. Her fiction has appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers Ann Pancake Volume 16, Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen, Northern Appalachia Review, The Last Word and Other Stories: A Shelia-Na-Gig Anthology, the Voices from the Attic anthology series, and other publications. Dzurilla’s manuscript, Work Greens, traces a young woman’s journey from single motherhood to employment as a steelworker at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works during the early 1970s. Dzurilla graduated from Carlow University’s Creative Writing Program, is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshop community, and lives in Pittsburgh.
