By Chris Cocca
When I was a boy on the Lehigh, Lenape lived in our border-mountains and we scouted wig-wam like dams on the land from the road to our grandparents’ trailer. When my son rides the Switch Back Gravity Rail over coal lines in Jim Thorpe, I hope to God the mountains are His and my boy might believe in his ancestor clans, the Bear and the Fox and the black-lunged dead Irish and Welsh. And when I die, that he cast me here burning, steam-engine hot, my dust spread over row homes, on porches, in gutters, the soot of me rendered from grease and smoke, the soot of me falling on forges and kilns, and Liberty Street like firework sulfur, the bright cracks and June bugs repeating in gravestones and waiting. And when God comes from the mountains, let Him come, and let Him build me from carbon and zinc, and my son from the living, our fathers from dirt, and with Him the Lenape and Molly McGuire, their altars great dams on the land. ■
Chris Cocca (chriscocca.com) is a food trucker and writer who grew up in his family’s mobile concession business in and around Allentown and Northeastern Pennsylvania in the ’80s and ’90s . His work has appeared at venues including Brevity, The Huffington Post, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Feed.
Cover image by Tom Wolf (creative commons).
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