SARAH ROSE NORDGRENThe St. Bernard Soap Factory
Twice a week I drive home past the St. Bernard Soap Factory where an army of infant soldiers is assembled under lights and smoke plumes. Women work the vats and the pressing machines. The men hold a lump in one hand and a knife in the other hand. Tucked into packets to be shipped and sold in shops, their white skin sleeps in white uniforms and each infant grips a bone-white rifle. The workers carve thousands with our faces ready for burial. Like rows of matches the army will keep watch in our graves while we doze. I pass the factory just before my exit, then I arrive at home and wash my hands in the kitchen. My two hands turn in the water like a cradle. They swallow and fill like a boat. 173 The Paris-American Sarah Rose
Nordgren is the author of Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), winner of
the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in Agni, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and the Best New Poets anthology. A recipient of two fellowships from the
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a 2014 Individual Excellence Award
from the Ohio Arts Council, Sarah Rose earned degrees from Sarah Lawrence
College and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she held the
Fred Chappell Fellowship. She grew up in Durham, NC and currently lives in
Cincinnati. For more information visit sarahrosenordgren.com.
Photo Credit: Daniel Dyar |
Next week's poet:
Keith Leonard |