Portside

Counting the Dead

By Susan Cossette

Gilgo Beach Long Island 2011

Call me Melissa.

He called me whore,

tucking my cell phone and cash

in his hip pocket.

He put me to sleep by the shore,

wrapped in burlap 

among the brushy scrub.

They pull my bones 

from the rocky sand,

my skull from a plastic bag--

Alas, poor girl,

we don't know who you are

but will poke the dry bits left of you

back at the lab.

Faceless, nameless shadows,

trading our flesh for cash.

Now, we matter more in death.

I spend my days counting the dead,

gathering my silent sisters one by one.

Some missing hands, or heads,

my job is to piece them together,

to make them beautiful again.

Megan, Maureen,

babies waiting home for you,

did you ask for this?

Amber, no one noticed you were gone,

feeding the hunger in your veins.

You didn't deserve it.

None of us did.

I found you all,

in the snow squall

of that December night.

Black beach, flashing police lights,

silence broken by sirens

and the hollow hum

of the crime lab generators.

What remains?

Crude holes in the tangled brush,

the buzz of rush hour traffic.

I regard the hot pink spray paint lines

faded on the sand,

marking the boundaries of our world.

A silver medal nailed to a tree.

Crime scene.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) and Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press).