A poem by Muriel Mackie, sophomore Marketing Major
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Ochre smoker,
Lungs made of brass.
I smell exhaust
Wafting up through the cracks
Of your teeth and your hair,
Fingernails split,
Yellowed eyes glowing
With nicotine gilt.
Skin flakes flicks with gaseous abandon,
Particulate air slowly swirling.
Breath rattles ragged through your iron breast,
Oxidized clamshell pearling
‘Til a great jewel forms
By virtue of heaving
Mucus, slick and thick and tainted,
Calcified inside your steaming
Boiler, collecting on your throat.
Burning beads of milky dew--
Acidic on a spongy lip,
Come flying fast when hurling chew.
Smog twines through porous lungs--
Weaving dancers grin sardonic,
Tarred feet grinding into blackened
Spillage, squelching delicate
Against your tongue,
Dry but for this beneficial oil--
Cracked as crumbling parchment,
But for your body’s foil.
Agent Orange has burning hands
That leave a napalm scar,
How kind of you to hold them close,
Cocoon yourself within its tar--
Another lizard with scaling skin,
Burrowed inside bubbling pits,
Suffocated by artificial catastrophe--
A sigh, a flick, another’s lit.
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