Haybales

by Alexandra Burack

–after Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel”

My great-grandmother, Anna, lived the night fellow Jewish peasants bolted from beet farms
with alerts the Cossack army would arrive by first breastfeed. Cossaks rode Russian Don horses
whose stamina rivaled that of the strongest Jewish farmwomen who tilled fields and raised
cottages by hand. In ruddy first light, the farmers’ haybales shimmered green as if dried grass
could be a waterfall. Inside thick and tightly-latticed mounds, scattered in a pattern only readable
by those who knew Hebrew, curled the Jewish children who’d trained to barely breathe, then
shutter nerves in stinging arms before movement could ripen. The Cossacks’ routine, other than
stealing eldest boys from every peasant household for forced conscription in the Tsar’s army,
was to run their glinting, filigreed swords full through the haystacks. But since Jewish children
weren’t sentient beings to them, but feral beasts to be culled to stop the rot that dared infect vast
countryside tracts of real Russians, the occasional rustle, then gurgled scream did not distract
mad soldiers. Cossacks never dismounted, so a single breakneck pass across the field, swords
heaved in split-second scythes, meant most silent children could survive, to be dug out by tense
bleeding hands of parents who sewed their jewelry into the hems of their dresses and traversed
on foot through baited forests westward, where they sold every meagre thing they owned for
black-market passports, the strangling soot of East-End London, then third-class steerage to
imaginary places like Australia and America.

Alexandra Burack is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, editor, and author of On the Verge (Plinth Books). Her recent work appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Roi Fainéant, Orlando, Broad River Review, Ink & Marrow, $–Poetry is Currency, FreezeRay Poetry, and Poetica Magazine, and is forthcoming in Spillway Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and Lumina Journal. She is a 2024 Artist Opportunity Grant recipient (AZ Commission on the Arts), and a former Artist Fellow in Poetry (CT Commission on the Arts). She currently serves as AZ Master Teacher/Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Chandler-Gilbert Community College (AZ), and as a volunteer Poetry Reader for The Los Angeles Review.