I know what you’re saying
about living near Lake Erie:
I lived on Lake Superior the year
the Edmund Fitzgerald went down.
We had a wood stove, several lanterns.

Losing power was fairly common,
my first marriage--alternately wonderful,
turbulent, then powerless to fix
structural issues that continued
despite a newborn son,
remodeling projects, squalls and stalls,
a deep bay of resentments
that turned red and lashed
against the shore that November,
the iron ore of gender roles and rolls
as deep as blood in our veins.

We’d seen the Fitzgerald
docked in Burlington Railyard,
Superior, pregnant with purpose,
waiting to be loaded--26,000 tons
of Mesabi taconite, a shifting cargo
of responsibility, too much mayhap
when icy waves troughed
then crashed over its railings.

Two years before, we’d seen taconite,
mined, an ugly gash of blasted pits,
cranes, shovels, dump trucks, elevators,
a honeymoon trip up the north shore
through Silver Bay, company town
of cookie cutter houses and streets,
as if progress and prosperity
could be stamped with a pattern.
We didn’t know what we were in for.

Sandra Lindow has served as WFOP West Central Regional VP since 1988. Her most recent poetry collection is Mother Hubbles' Cupboard, 2025. She lives on a hilltop in Menomonie, Wisconsin.