What to Do with All the Bodies?
Jane Ellen Glasser
 
“Bodies are coming out of our ears.”
              —Andrew T. Cleckley
              Brooklyn Funeral Home Director
 
 
A warehouse in Cook County, Chicago,
that once held simple cargo
has been repurposed
into a refrigerated morgue.
Like frozen vegetables,
the body bags are kept fresh.
 
In Detroit’s Sinai-Grace Hospital,
in vacant rooms, 
white body bags
are piled like stacked logs
waiting to become ash.
 
At Brooklyn Hospital Center
bodies covered in plastic
are wheeled out on gurneys, 
then forklifted like rubbish
into a refrigerated trailer.
 
Because few morgues can hold
even 200 bodies,
on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn,
a dreadful stench leaked
from two rented U-Haul trucks
outside a funeral home.