I rose up first in a big vacant state with an x in its middle

to mark the place I was born into dying

surrounded by oil refinery towers with flames

like giant birthday candles you could never

get big enough to blow out. Before I was

they were, and before them, reptiles and mammals

died and rotted and were crushed into carbon

then coal, then oil in the earth

whose deep core held bigger burning.

My daddy labored here, at The Gulf,

Which meant oil refinery, but also

a distance he drowned in,

caged inside this high hurricane fence.

In steel-toed boots for forty-two years, he walked.

The gold hatpin he got at retirement

had four diamond chips

for a smile and two rubies like eyes,

and he passed it to me

because it was a holy relic

of suffering and sacrifice,

so I wanted it most.

He breathed in this chemical stink

some sixteen hours or days on end

in a storm, and it perfumed his overalls.

The catalyst he pumped on the cracking unit

burst through with enormous pressure to break down

the black crude’s chemical bonds

into layers, into products,

and many ignorant men did twist the spigots

and unplug the clogs and keep it all

rivering so the buried pipes

could carry out so many flammables north—

North! Where books are written and read.

The sunset down here glows green and hard-washed

denim blue and the scalded pink of flesh.