The Boston Molasses Disaster

\Sometimes you feel like a nut. Somtimes you don't.\
\Almond Joy's got nuts. Mounds don't.\

1919. January. Boston is always lovely
this time of year. When you walk the streets
of Harvard, life wraps itself around you
and whispers every sound your ears can
take. The sky resumes its inoffensive
pastel shade after a brutal Nor'Easter,
and there's talk of how the Red Sox will
repeat as World Series champions, and
if they don't, another title is just
around the corner. Trolleys turntable
down cobblestone streets, and the metal
of the giant vats of
molasses that tower fifty feet high
inhale with each cold snap, exhale with
each warm front, weakening with each
breath.

\Better not lay a finger on my Butterfinger.\

Their names are unknown, but they resonate
through history. More than the twenty-one
people who drowned when the tank on
Commercial Street gave way, and a deluge
of sugary confection splashed across
several blocks of Beantown. They now know
that the kiss of death shall never be
sweeter than it was for them. As I gaze
across the Northeastern campus toward Roxbury,
I gaze at the sky, growing darker in complexion.
If you squint hard enough, it looks like
oxidizing taffy, smashing sidewalks,
swallowing jaywalkers in a carbohydrate-
curdled crest. And in at least one victim's
mind, he knew his death would be the butt
of jokes for decades. How did the men of
his block die? "Well, Bob took a bullet in
The Great War." "Jerry caught the Spanish Flu."
"Well, Edgar died drowning in sticky sediment
that would be scooped up and sold the first
graders in Worcester."

This poem is for the guy who urinated on an
electric fence, for the eleven people a year
who die by toppling vending machines onto
themselves, for the burglar who got stuck in
a chimney and let starvation take him. This is
for the woman who got hit by a meteor of frozen
waste excreted by an Delta Airlines jumbo jet.

\Not going anywhere for a while? Grab a Snickers.\

They were twenty-one people, aged five to
ninety-one.