SARAH ROSE NORDGREN

The 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

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  Next week's poet:

 Keith LeonardJJCCCACc