Logistics, 2020
How many bodies can
be held in refrigerated
trailers, giving families
time to claim them?
The number of those,
anonymous, buried
at the public cemetery
in New York, increased
five-fold in April.
Outside a Brooklyn
funeral home, dozens
of decomposing bodies
were found in one
tractor-trailer
and one rented U-Haul.
Eighteen thousand dead
in eighteen thousand
body bags are moved
by forklift to one
hundred and fifty
refrigerated trailers,
fifteen rented vans.
Dedicated Carnivore At the TSA
I
watched you
watch her
grab the tape
you had firmly affixed
round the lid of the cooler.
Rip
she went.
You watched
her as she
dove into its white hold
and brought up the brown pork butt.
She
made sure
she knew
what it was,
carefully rotating
each piece before replacing
it,
extract-
ing that
ham then the
Fanestil baloney
and its smoked bacon, vacuum-
packed.
You were
the new
Miriam,
watching such a precious
cargo being lifted out.
Laura Golberg’s poem Erasure has been nominated for a Pushcart 2021 Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Spillway, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among other places. She won first place in the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Competition.
