Elizabeth Poreba is a retired New York City high-school English teacher. She has published two collections of poems, Vexed and Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring, and two chapbooks, The Family Profile and New Lebanon. The eighth line of this poem is from Elizabeth Willis’s poem, “And What My Species Did.” “Ruin from the air” is a reference to the book by the same name, written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts.