Merlin Ural Rivera
Summer 2025 | Poetry
a mass grave in a palm grove
the digging went on for days
before he found his son’s body
in a spot far
from where he had buried him.
he had wrapped him in three sheets of plastic.
two of them were gone,
and the third was torn off
in a long strip
but held together
with plastic clips.
there were lines
on his son’s young face,
and dust filled those lines.
dust on his lashes,
and dust in the folds of his ear,
behind which he used to keep a cigarette.
the father looked around
at all the white shrouds around him
lying in the lap of charred stones,
at the palm trees blown by the wind
like long-haired women,
at the sky, where as a child
he had seen a fighter jet
draw the map of his land
with its white trail
and another one piercing a gash in it,
and then he looked at his son’s mouth
open like a gray abyss.
Merlin Ural Rivera has received several Finalist Awards from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as a Soho House Fellowship and a residency at Willapa Bay AiR. Her short story “Through the Branches” was included in the anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War, and her poems and short stories have appeared in Copper Nickel, Rattle, RHINO and The Greensboro Review, among other journals. She was an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review 2024 International Poetry Competition and a finalist for The Florida Review Editors’ Award in Poetry. Born in Bulgaria and raised in Turkey, she now lives in New Jersey and is a proudly unionized instructor at the School of Visual Arts.