Poetry

By Nancy Scott

 

Breaker Boys

after Growing Up in Coal Country

by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

 

Dust, smoke, and steam turn boys, as young as five,

coal-black. They hunch like old men, on pine boards

set across long iron chutes, bear the monotony,

 

the racket, the whips for a day’s twenty-five cents.

Chew tobacco, cover their mouths with cloth

to block the bitter air. Ten, twelve hours, gloveless

 

fingers snatch debris – slate and rock – from rushing coal.

Fingers swell and bleed. At night, mothers rub in goose

grease to toughen up the tips. After a luckless lad

 

stumbled down a chute and smothered, his mother went

mad with grief. Tomorrow another might lose his leg,

his fingers. Boys learn how to sabotage conveyers, reap

 

more time to play ball at noon. Dream of first jobs

underground: nipper, spragger, mule driver. Envy

the older ones’ freedom in miles of dark tunnels,

 

echo-free chambers, absent of supervision; still

mindful of shift and splinter, roof collapse, fire, rats,

ghosts, water trickling deep within Earth’s gut.

(first published in Out of Line, 2009)

 

Boston’s Great Molasses Flood, 1919

On January 15th, it wasn't snow that kept schools closed,

but rivets popping like machine-gun fire, a steel tank bursting

two million gallons of molten molasses spurting into the air.

 

First a dark rumble, then a roar, as the North End

turned into a wet, brown hell. Autos and wagons mired,

freight cars crushed, entire buildings crumbled like pasteboard.

 

The Great War was done; no need to turn molasses

into alcohol for ammunition, but Purity Distilling

demanded one last batch before the end.

 

Twenty-two dead, horses drowned, hundreds injured.

Clean-up crews and rescuers, knee-deep in makings of rum,

listened as church bells pealed in Prohibition.

 

Throughout the city, for decades afterwards, they say

you could smell the sweet aroma, and on certain buildings,

if you looked closely, the high water mark left by molasses.

(first published in Flint Hills Review, 2005)

 

 

Miami's First POW Home from Korea, 1953

He tries to eat but can't.

It's not that he doesn't want to.

The hum in his head halts him,

marches him further

and further into frostbitten hills,

chains him at dusk in a makeshift cage.

He’s lost count of days, nights

prey to artillery of his own men.

Sharp edges pierce a low sky,

release bloody rain

that freezes on contact with the hard soil.

 

Survival depends on a skinny boy.

You take me with you, the boy says

in halting English, as if it were possible

to simply bow good-bye and head south.

The boy sneaks him clean rice, shoves

a metal cup between bamboo poles.

 

Now he sits in a diner with the blonde.

He orders a burger and fries, a milk shake.

He wants to be ordinary, do ordinary things.

When the plates arrive, he breaks out in a sweat.

 

Hands tremble as he tries to pick up the burger.

Aren't you hungry? the girl asks,

dipping fries in a pool of catsup.

He’s hungrier than he can remember.

He feels the worm crawl up his anus,

settle in his intestines, waiting

for him to take the first bite,

waiting for its share.

(first published in Mudfish, 2007)

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Nancy Scott is the author of two books of poetry, Down to the Quick (2007) and One Stands Guard, One Sleeps (2009) both published by Plain View Press, and a chapbook, A Siege of Raptors (2010) from Finishing Line Press. Nancy is the managing editor of U.S.1 Worksheets, the journal of the U.S.1 Poets' Cooperative in New Jersey. Nancy's poetry has appeared in such journals as Mudfish, Witness, Poet Lore, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Slant, Out of Line, The Ledge, and Flint Hills Review.