the mill town with heavy granite mills and lots of towering smokestacks billowing

smoke all over the town and up through the clouds to smear with soot the face of God.

history of life part one:

In my life, traveling south one could look in any direction

and see a grouping of massive textile mills. the same was true

when traveling north, and west and east. there were

aerial views of the mills one could see when visiting

the Historical Society, and with a sense-of pride

while telling strangers that the mills were built with granite

quarried from right here in the town where they sat,––

heavy-footed, sweltering, smoking from their stacks,

and bloated with the weary women of the needle trade,

my mother, and her sisters among them, along with

the mothers and sisters from across the neighborhoods.

It was a rare sight to see a working textile mill go out of business.

Fall River made its bones in the sweat of its women, and was marked

with the same block letters as Boston and New York in maps hung

in classrooms all over town. true, the maps were produced in the

late 1800s and early 1900s, but I wasn’t too far behind.

my old uncle Octavio told tales of walking to the Sagamore Mill

as a young “cloth-lapper” dodging ferocious dinosaurs along the way.

and the century turned to the south where cheap labor was abundant

and raw cotton was a footprint away, and up here came the closings,

and came the conflagrations from the oil-soaked floors, first one then another,

and then another, and then one after another.

history of life part two:

collating …