The Coal Life: Poems

Methane

Methane 1. Whistle A tricked jake scratching under a white oak fans out, shudders, pushes out his chest and gobbles back. A teacher and most of her students stop mid-sentence; four or five continue the cadence: 5 − 3 = 2, 4 − 3 = 1 . . . A young woman drops a bottle of bleach at the company commissary. The night shift rolls over, squints in afternoon sunlight. They know the whistle should wake them only in the darkness to work the mine; in the daylight, it screeches cave-in or methane. A Greek woman pries the lids from Mason jars, raises a butter crock in the well, while the town scrambles down to the slope mouth. She rolls dough for pierogies, crimps kraut and prunes inside, drops the square pies in boiling water, waits for them to bloat and rise to the surface. 53 2. Extraction Mahoney goes in first, checks the flame in his safety lamp. “Itty bitty blue you’re through,” he says, waves us in. The first body kneels against the coal rib, his back to the blast, face nuzzled in the wing of his elbow when the after damp took him. The upper half of another, rock, and scrap must have shot a quarter mile down the shaft like lead from a shotgun barrel. His eyes still goggle from the flight. We throw torsos over our shoulders, gather the rest in buckets and sacks. Doc spreads them out in a line, looks for safety tags on those with clothes. He measures feet and starts matching pairs, presses palms together in the lamplight, checks lengths of fingers, remnants of nails and grit underneath. Kuzma counts one extra. 54 ...