Smog

Written by Iris Zhu from Deerfield Academy, Massachusetts, USA

I am woken by the grey that muffles the sky.

On my bedside the candle burns white as light–

melting, melting; its supple wax,

like sweat dried into salt

turns an opaque, rigor mortis stiff.

The great huffing and puffing of man, it curls

like a sigh of frost seeping over a morning meadow–

out from the esophagus of metal organs, out

into the miserable evening stretched against night.

It licks gilded, gum-sticky handrails,

flirts around the hips of a lady’s vermilion skirt–

blossoming, wallowing,

 a perfume of black omen

settling in your lungs.

It is poison you taste.

The streets are dizzy with it.

The men hang from the clotheslines,

wilted stems drooping from open windows;

they laugh and boast between

each puff, each choke, each laboring breath–

it brews them a strange romantic death.

Birds fall like quiet snow, 

white scaled bellies paint rivers pale

as moonlight, and even the stars 

have curdled a sickly yellow. 

Then it reaches the sky–

once Sicilian blue, then newspaper grey, 

now the yellow-brown of old bruises deepening still

until it snuffs out the city,

a guttered flame.