part of world war ii
was the taste
of hershey's chocolate
when i was in the third grade
at berryhill elementary
and would get off
the school bus
at logan's dairy farm
where mr. logan kept
melted hershey chunks
in a big vat
to measure out into
the milk cans for
chocolate milk and most every friday
he would give me a wrapped up
broke off piece of hershey's to take home
that was bigger than
two candy bars
which mama made me save up till
saturday night
when she would pack a picnic basket
and daddy would drive us out
to morris field
to watch the a-20's come in
and crash which happened
a good bit maybe
three or four times a month with
the saturdays being
the best of all
and drew some pretty big crowds
not that the army would
ever let you get near them
except that one time a pilot overshot
the runway and went down
in the middle of wilkinson boulevard
and had traffic so tied up
it took forty minutes till anybody could get moving
so much time that i ate
all my hershey's and got
sick and had to stand outside of the car
in the red lights from
the ambulance and mama said well that is
the last time you ever bring that stuff
home with you
but daddy put on his deep foreman's voice
like he would use at u. s. rubber
and said now eva
where is your heart anybody can see
the boy has got the flu
aint that right jimmy i told her
to bring you a sweater
but that was the last time i ever ate hershey's
and to this day i tend to favor
the kind they make in england
that has these bubbles in it that
you can't taste the chocolate right at first
and then it explodes
when you don't expect it
till all of a sudden it's all inside your cheeks
and it has a real different taste too
but if you don't have
any teeth like me and you're not careful
it will sometimes drool out
the corner of your mouth like the blood used to look
in a black and white movie
when a jap pilot got shot down which
made people feel good and forget some of the awful
things going on
in the rest of the world
like after the war mama and daddy were running
a little convenience store
in kannapolis and living
in two rooms at the back when daddy
fell over and died from a stroke
before i could even get there
and by the time i flew in from atlanta for the funeral
somebody's little kid
was sitting in the candy aisle at the store
with a whole box
of hershey bars between his legs
but mama didn't care
not me either not even if it
gave him the flu
