NVN Monday: COUNTING THE DEAD
by Susan Cossette
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Gilgo Beach, Long Island 2011
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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.
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Author's note: This is a poem I wrote way back in 2011. I am originally from the Metro New York area, and this story was all over the news more than a decade ago. The story of these women haunted me. This past week, it appears that there is some resolution to the story.
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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 Verse News, 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), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.