Mary Petrosky Hometown I'd like to say it didn't touch me. But you can't live cheek to jowl with a refinery and not have oil ooze into your pores, that pale brown sky wipe its grimy breeze on you. Gritty's something that happens to you, like hydrocarbons in catalytic cracking: kerosene sinking, butane rising, asphalt settling out. Things being siphoned off. It wasn't until three years after my father died I figured out what a pipe fitter does. He was a man in a fedora who knew his coefficients of expansion. Me, I obsess over metal's contraction, how with a sip of air I can taste polymers forming. It has its uses, grit; it keeps your tongue sharp, your heart crusty. I thought I'd scrubbed it all away. But every time a whistle blows, I look to the west, expecting that fireball orange sunset.

Photo (detail) by Mary Petrosky

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