Pretending To Grow Up

Furnaced-up, cancered-up, in the last decades
of declining life, two dying steel mill towns,
hard as thrown stones, became parents,
birthing cold-cast, acid-covered children
In a momentary distraction that soon passed.

Two-lane taffy roads, slapped on to the floors
of sheer-face rock walls hundreds of stories high,
connected the parents, until the landslides started,
making way for a new bridge they never really ever built.
When they finally told us where the roads were, we left,
just ahead of the last landslide. Staying meant burial
in slag heaps and rock piles, or drowning in slate-cold,
strip-mined lakes full with stolen-rust, work cars and deadly,
pointed steel just below the glassy, still surface.

Fading towns have their time, mostly living short,
dying long, ending up in stories and on maps,
which you can get for five dollars,
along with a lottery ticket and a six-pack
in a diner at any end of town.
Some say the towns are still there.
They always lie like dogs in hometowns,
just another stick-sharp reason to love them.
Even now when fleeing residents are lost,
outlines of the towns can still be seen.
And in some parts of those faded, smoky outlines,
iron ore is still reduced to molten iron
by removing the oxygen.