Michael Meyerhofer: “Wing Foot, 1919”
WING FOOT, 1919
Halfway through a pandemic
that girdled the world just a few years
off a strict diet of trench warfare,
an airship caught fire and crashed
into a bank in Chicago—which is to say
it fell through the skylight,
a fireball nobody quite believed
thus many could not outrun.
This touched off a storm
of legislation, flight rules, lessons
society did its best to maintain.
Newspapers speak of gasoline tanks
plummeting toward the bank rotunda
where over 150 bookkeepers and clerks,
nearly all girls, were working.
Later, some twenty thousand
gathered to watch the fire trucks,
all those knuckles of smoke uncurling
into orange fingers that seemed
to flail desperately for the clouds.
Dozens burnt, nine dead from the bank
plus two from the airship itself—
parachutes vanishing like cobwebs
touched by a blowtorch.
They say young women jumped
out windows they broke themselves,
hoping someone would catch them.
Michael Meyerhofer‘s fifth poetry book, Ragged Eden, was published by Glass Lyre Press. He has been the recipient of the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Award, the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize, and other honors. His work has appeared in Southern Review, The Sun, Ploughshares, Rattle, Hayden’s Ferry, Gargoyle Magazine, Missouri Review, and other journals. He is also the author of a fantasy series and the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review.