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Janney Ohatchee, Alabama Jake Adam York
Hidden like a sentry, the furnace blooms with sumac, crawls with lizards. It smokes off rain so hard you can hear them breathe, one breath lifting granite, pulling coal, the hundred hands digging wells in the hill where the forge-works rust, above, where their graves hoard irons all their own and take on water just in case. From there, I could jump to the stack’s jagged rim and stare down the barrel to this crossroads of light and fable a blast or count saplings to predict its fall. But here, where the tuyeres draw wind to spin the rumor of fire and the crucible sings like a shell the edge seems years away. The smoke never clears. The stones stay warm to the touch. Maybe, if rain could wake the Coosa to flood this wild, to roll the stone beneath the slag and clay again, maybe then, we’d have a chance. But the clouds move on. The thunder’s gone to Georgia. A mud bloom cools in the hearth’s debris and a copperhead coils from the brash, bright as molten iron. I ease back, and breathe, grasping at sumacs, ready to turn and run. And when I do I pull to feel them give, to feel their blisters break. Originally appeared in Southern Review
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