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.

 

E. Laura Golberg

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.

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