Deborah Bacharach
Stones with Dire Warnings Have Been Surfacing
An owl dropped one in the soup.
A rat coddled one in the back of the cell.
Then abandoned it.
Our past tries to warn us.
If you will again see
this stone your sister’s dowry
so you will weep, so shallow
the water. You didn’t know.
Your sister! Your sister!
The famine of love is upon us.
Editor’s Note: Hunger stones are a type of landmark common in Central Europe. Placed in riverbanks with inscriptions that refer to historical droughts when water levels were at record lows, these inscribed boulders serve as famine memorials and warnings. They were erected in Germany and in ethnic German settlements throughout Europe in the 15th through 19th centuries.
Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, The Antigonish Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Cimarron Review, among other journals, and in the anthologies Jump Start: A Northwest Renaissance Anthology (Steel Toe Books, 2009), edited by Lonny Kaneko, Pat Curran, and Susan Landgraf; A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books, 2002), edited by Margarita Donnelly, Beverly McFarland, Micki Reaman, and Carole Simmons Oles; and Sex and Single Girls: Women Write on Sexuality (Seal Press, 2000), edited by Lee Damsky. She lives in Seattle where she a writing tutor. Online at DeborahBacharach.com
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