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October 27, 1948
from the Some Afternoons and Evenings series

Michael Ceraolo

Halloween arrived this day
in Donora, Pennsylvania,
but
there were no treats for anyone;
nature,
with the able assistance of man,
played a dirty trick on the town

A temperature inversion,
where
higher-altitude warm air
trapped cold air close to the ground,
created a Death Mask of Fog,
with
smoke and chemical pollutants
from the manufacturing plants
collecting instead of being dispersed

Night for four straight days,
until
on the fifth day, the actual Halloween,
the rains came and dispersed the fog,
but
it was too late for many:
the deaths had already begun,
and
would continue for the next few months,
the best estimate of the death toll
being seventy,
and
there were thousands sickened
whose lives would never be the same

The corporate malefactors
largely got away with it,
paying the victims and survivors’ families
a mere pittance:
the pollution
was somehow “an act of God”

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