Volume 5 | Issue 3 | Aug - Sept
2011 |
Mc Millan Water Treatment Plant
Washington, DC
Kim Roberts
In the control house, metal wheels
still turn on drive-shaft stems
but all the gauges zeroed out
decades ago. The paint
has chipped and cracked
into lizard skin, and dead leaves
pile up under broken windows.
The clean-sand towers
are hollow grey cylinders
netted with wild vines,
the levers on their undersides
white with leached mineral stalactites.
The doors to the filtration caverns
are rotting; they burst
their rusty orphan hinges.
The cave-dark inside is vaulted
like a church, and pocked
with clerestory circles and half-moons
where manhole covers above
have twisted away. Small trees sprout
in the cement cracks, and weeds
push up between the bricks.
I pocket a screw clouded with glaucoma
near a cavern that’s collapsed into itself,
one large grave lined in concrete and sand.
Kim Roberts - Kim Roberts is the editor of the on-line journal Beltway
Poetry Quarterly ,the author of three books of poems, most recently Animal
Magnetism, winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize (Pearl Editions, January 2011), as
well as a nonfiction chapbook, Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word Poetry in DC
(Beltway Books, 2010), and editor of the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems
About Washington, DC (Plan B Press, 2010). Her poems have been translated into
Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Mandarin. She is the recipient of grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, the
Humanities Council of Washington, DC, and has been a writer-in-residence at twelve
artist colonies.
Washington, DC
e-mail: contact@kimroberts.org
Washington, DC
