Featured in the current issue of Great River Review:
Fiction
Nick Healy • Pamela Carter Joern • Sheila O'Connor
Poetry
Robert Bly • Robert Gibb • John Haines • Judith Harris • Mark Jarman
Ted Kooser • Nancy Mitchell • Linda Pastan • Dave Smith
Gerald Stern • Alison Stone
Translations
Jean Arp • Bengt Berg • Atanas Dalchev • Blaga Dimitrova
Durs Grünbein • Lars Gustafsson • Fernando Iturburu • David Ledesma
Plus, new work by
Noel Crook • Howard Faerstein • Edward Harkness • David McElroy
John Morgan • Mihaela Moscaliuc • Michael Paul Thomas
In the Narrows
HOWARD FAERSTEIN
We sifted the contents of one plastic bag into another,
saving some of her for our missing brother.
Then we spilled her ashes into the sea,
into the atmosphere, onto our shoes,
and then we ate of her.
We fed our mother to the eels and crabs
and mermaids lurking behind the rocks along Shore Road
across from the traffic of the highway.
We fed our mother to the tidal strait
linking Upper & Lower New York Bay.
Her ashes spilled into the shallows,
clumping into the wholeness she lacked—
black headed gulls with darkened wingtips
shrieking above her form.
Coming together after seven years we fed
our mother's ashes to the wind blowing
five feet above the deep
while we leaned on the railing of the pier
watching waves carrying out to sea,
widening, then compressing,
returning her to Odessa.
We emptied mother out of a plastic bag—
only a name left, her journey just beginning—
but I see her as my children will see me
when I am powder mixed with earth
and as she prayed each sabbath to three candle-flames,
for she was her father's daughter,
haltingly we recited the mourners' Kaddish
and then we ate of her
for we are our mother's sons.
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