Poem

...Her book of poems, "Death by Renaissance," was published this year by Bottom Dog Press...

...Paola Corso was born in a Pittsburgh river town where her Italian immigrant father and grandfather worked in the steel mill...

...Poem Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing I held my breath and counted backwards until my lungs began sucking in my body instead of the air that was not for breathing if I was to be particular about the particulates and I could and I was and I had to for myself and for the memory of the twenty in the smog who blued from asphyxiation, waiting for the 130-pound tank of oxygen strapped on someone's back, lugged from house to house in darkness, puffing them up with a little purity and then gone for another who was just as particular about the particulates, the sulfur, the carbon monoxide, heavy metal dust trapped in the river valley and I imagined this as my lungs inhaled my face and neck and chest then my stomach, legs and feet until I was all inside myself and I took one look at my lungs the sponge that was now a board with no give and no take the color of an oil slick the song of a worm and I wanted out...

...Paola Corso Author's Note: In October 1948, twenty people were killed from smoke and fumes of the zinc and iron works in Donora, twenty-eight miles south of Pittsburgh, in the first known American deaths from air pollution...

...A 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow, she teaches writing in New York City...