Featured Author: E. Laura Golberg

July 2021 | poetry

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.

The Watch

July 2021 | poetry

Restless in pleasure’s absence,

I watched when my mother woke,

startled by a rooster

that chimed and paced

on the barbed wire fence.

She pulled the sheet

over her shoulder, sank

into the cushion and lingered

a moment longer

while I pretended to be asleep.

Each morning for the past two years

she turned the crown well

of my father’s watch

how he used to do

before getting out of bed.

My father mostly spoke

the truth, but he lied

when he told me

he liked my jagged bangs

the last time we went to visit.

It took my mother one afternoon

to trim them herself

with a pair of shears

she borrowed from a shepherd

living down the hill.

We both squinted

when we heard a soldier’s whistle.

My father, thinner now, came toward us,

his lips pursed in a frown,

and his hands curled in fists.

Melissa Andres

Melissa Andrés is a poet. Originally from Cuba, she arrived in the United States at the age of six. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in The Laurel Review, Rattle Magazine, The San Antonio Review, Ligeia Magazine, and Inkwell Journal, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Yezidi, Northern Iraq

April 2021 | poetry

A Yezidi woman sits across from me

her eyes are flat black

like no eyes should look

as if her spirit has been sucked

backward through her body

to fly away somewhere else

somewhere safe

before

Kocho

Sinjar.

“Is it true?”

her handler asks me

“Is it true what ISIS did to the children?”

She starts to cry

great rolling tears

streaking her face black mourning mascara.

I seek safety inside myself

in a world that offers none.

Is it true?

is it true?

It is true.

I hear her voice

asking over and over

like the crows now cawing over mass graves

as the Yezidi woman gazes

but not at me.

Susan Notar

Susan Notar has flown over Iraq in helicopters wearing body armor and makes a mean beurre blanc sauce. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Gyroscope, Written in Arlington, Antologia de Poemas Alianza Latina, Penumbra, Joys of the Table An Anthology of Culinary Verse, Springtime in Winter: An Ekphrastic Study in Art, Poetry, and Music. She works at the U.S. State Department helping vulnerable communities in the Middle East.