Sarah Stern
Haigerloch Sisters
We’d visit Selma and Berta on their Catskills farm every summer.
Mom always said, We’re going to Haigerloch.
All these years I thought she made the name up,
but it was another town in the Schwarzwald.
I have a photo of its big yellow sign.
Selma and Berta were from Haigerloch.
Berta’s long gray braids
crowned her head.
Her smile spanned farther than her teeth.
Selma was the quiet sister.
Their house sat crookedly opposite the barn.
The dining room had a heavy
German table, a picture of her husband
and son with Selma’s eyes.
Both shot July 1941 in Theresienstadt.
Berta and Selma must have
had 20 dogs, more cats.
Chicken eggs all over.
Selma milked the cows,
pulling at them efficiently
as she sat on a stool.
We’d pitch a tent on a hilltop, as far
as the station wagon could go.
Make a fire.
Fry eggs in the morning.
The cows were named stars there—
Johnny Carson was an ornery bull.
I remember so much cow shit
and the dogs, yelping, wild in the valley.
Berta fed the calves.
She let me feel their sandpaper
tongues. My whole hand
in their mouths.
Sarah Stern is the author of But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock, 2014), Another Word for Love (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and in 2019, We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in many publications, recently in The American Dream, The Man Who Ate His Book: The Best of Ducts.org, Epiphany, Freefall, New Verse News, Rise Up Review, Swim Everyday, Verse Daily and What Rough Beast. She is a five-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Poetry Award. She is a Communications Manager at WES. You can see more of her work at www.sarahstern.me.
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