Featured Author: E. Laura Golberg

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

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

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.

Tobi Alfier

Bench Warrant Wednesday

 

You’re finally back in your hometown,

only snow greets your arrival.

 

Court date’s in a few hours,

just time to check into some

 

cheap hotel and change into clothes

that say I’m a good girl, clothes

 

that’ll be dumped at the charity shop

after free breakfast, local bank,

 

and go pay the fine tomorrow.

No time for visiting or sightseeing—

 

you’ll see all you want from the train

on the head-out-of-town express.

 

Window cracked to let a thin stream of smoke out,

you breathe in the incense of pines,

 

catch a quick glimpse of your old house

a little more canted, a lot less yours.

 

All the wildflowers buried deep until spring

do nothing to coax you back,

 

and you leave this town that doesn’t bear repeating

once again, the stillness of dusk broken only

 

by wisps of winter shadows through the trees,

a jukebox song of wild horses in your mind.

 

 

The Year of No Men

 

Granny’s on the front porch with me

playing gin and drinking gin.

I have a Jolt Cola to keep awake.

 

Mama’s coming to get me soon,

take me to the monthly family day

at the corrections house just down the road.

 

They call it “house” so it sounds nice,

but you can’t just leave when you want.

Daddy’s there for a while and that’s all I know.

 

We got a one-year lease on a nice double-wide,

Granny’s a couple rows over.

Other ladies and kids mostly fill in the rest.

 

Mama goes over to our real house every few weeks,

waters the plants, grabs up the bills,

cleans the messages off the garage door.

 

I don’t get to go ‘cause those messages—

they’re not too nice most times and mama says

I’m too young to understand.

 

So she brings me back a lemon pie

from the gas station mini mart

and I watch Granny get stuporfied.

 

Took a lotta years living

before I could sift through the truth

of our time at the trailer park,

 

and I made a lot of promises to myself

after that: no bail, no messages

written on any garage doors cause of me,

 

and gin would always be cards, jelly jars

only for juice and for baking, and “house”

would mean house, with toys in the yard.

 

Tobi Alfier

Tobi Alfier is a multiple Pushcart nominee and multiple Best of the Net nominee. “Slices of Alice & Other Character Studies” was published by Cholla Needles Press. “Symmetry: earth and sky” was published by Main Street Rag. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).

Horse Opera

They drifted west from the North and South to taste

a common dust in the rearguard of uncommitted cows,

 

Surprised maybe that they could dig their spurs cooperatively

into the partisan enterprises of ubiquitous rustlers.

 

Pinned down in a wallow, fighting for their left-over lives,

Union boys and Johnny Rebs passed the ammunition.

 

Behind pearl-button pockets, sick hearts healed

and soiled souls bleached cleaner under a wide sky.

 

They forked their broncs, built their loops, and knew

the stench of branding from their own seared hides.

 

The horses rode clean and hard through sweet-grass.

Eroded lakebed arguments of landscape didn’t matter.

 

They circled, sang to the night, and shaped an honest pride

that helped to hold the poker peace and scab the civil wound.

 

Robin B. Carey

Emeritus prof residing in Missoula, Montana, with wife and family. National Endowment for the Arts Award and Oregon Book Award, both in creative non-fiction.

A Man who envies Eugene Levy

is harvesting eyebrows grown in a petri dish teeming with a mixture of Minoxidil, Finasteride, (think recent, indecent President), sandalwood oil, lavender, rosemary, and thyme oils, or a mixture of hippopotamus fat, crocodile, tomcat, snake and ibex oils. Alternatively, in a mirror experiment, he parboils porcupine hair in creek water, which, when cooled, is applied to the scalp for four days. In his spare time he sautés  the left foreleg of a female greyhound in 50 weight motor oil with a donkey hoof, the smell of which he finds efficacious. He shies from the likes of Hippocrates, a shining dome himself, whose hoary recipe included horseradish, fresh pigeon guano, beetroot, opium, and an obligatory artillery of other spices, though not necessarily in any requisite order. In a later immodest proposal, he, Hippocrates II of Kos, none too gingerly suggested castration at an early age, an effective procedure confirmed by modern day researchers, but not advocated. When Jules Caesar began losing his hair, and minded, he tried everything to reverse the curse and hide his shiny pate. He firstly  grew his thinning mane long in the back and brushed it over his scalp in an early version of the Propecia comb-over. His lover Cleopatra recommended a home remedy consisting of ground-up mice, a neigh of horse teeth, and slathering of bear grease. This too had little effect. So the Roman dictator took to covering his scalp with a laurel wreath. Truth will out. The Ides will march. Though popular in ancient times, hairpieces were revived in the 17th century by such as King Louis XIII of France, who donned a toupee to mask his blinding baldness. Massive wigs featuring elaborate curls and peppered with white powder, raged among French and English nobles. Many superstitions surround hair and hair loss. A Man bemuses: most common in North America concerned disposal of hair combings. If a bird acquires the combings, the owner will go mad, lose what’s left his or her hair, or simply die. To lose one’s hair in a male pattern or female pattern can be extremely distressing. Modern therapy involves the use of topical minoxidil (2% and 5%) and oral finasteride. Excreta of various sorts have featured heavily in history’s baldness cures – presumably inspired by the same fertilizing properties sought by gardeners. A gentle physician in old Rome prescribed burning the genitals of a donkey and mixing the ash with one’s own urine to form a paste. While Aristotle may have applied goat’s urine to his scalp, King Henry VIII was said to favor dog and horse urine. Some Native American tribes preferred a poultice of chicken or cow manure. Ireland, 1000 A.D.: One Celtic remedy for baldness instructed patients to stuff mice, no matter live or dead, into a clay jar, seal it, bury it beside a fire, and take everything out after a year. A tip to the not so wise: Make sure to wear gloves when you touch what’s inside! If you don’t, hair will sprout from your fingertips. Meanwhile, the man, remember him, has lost interest in things depilatory, and gone madly Nair do well.

 

Richard Weaver

The author lives in Baltimore where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, the Baltimore Book Festival, and is the poet-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. More than 100 of his Prose Poems have appeared since 2016. He is also the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars, 2005, performed 3 times to date by the Birmingham Symphony, and once by the Juilliard Ensemble. He is neither a blockhead nor a stanzagrapher.

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