In Canary, I borrow the image of the canary in the coal mine to highlight the inadequacy of our current methods for protecting our health from environmental air pollutants. With recent stop-gap solutions to overarching environmental problems such as China’s efforts to de-smog Beijing for the Olympic Games by limiting driving to certain weekdays, and our own ozone alert warnings which treat smog as a natural phenomenon rather than a man-made abnormality; a personal early-warning system such as a canary caged in our lungs seems a poetic solution.