“She won’t stop sending lamb hearts to the post office”

This poem was originally published on The Pittsburgher’s predecessor, The Dog Door Cultural.

The postmaster is exhausted, one more

Carcass, he says and we’ll send them all

Back. we will be doing her a favor.

The workers nod, but know the empty

Gesture, know he will hold the package like

A stillborn, gingerly, before sending

It out with the rest.

They are sick of the meat smell

But don’t protest:

They know the divine rightness

Of the customer. they know

We all want to love with the precision

Of a surgeon’s knife but have only our hands,

How we clutch at the warmth of a

Killed thing--

How this makes extraction ragged. ▲

Melanie Greenberg attends college in New York, but is spending the year studying poetry and art history at the University of Oxford. In her poetry, she explores different facets of being alone or unseen and the comfort it brings, as well as the confinement. Melanie's work has appeared in Nixes Mate Review and the Eunoia Review.