Excerpt from Catsup by Doris Ferleger

The following poem appears in Tiferet’s February 2016 issue. The entire issue is available for immediate download.

So many war stories my big-bellied poppa tells
end up being intimate
with a certain food, and perhaps more important,
with the purpose of that food.

The inaugural food story was about potatoes.
Or that’s what I thought, at first. Raw potatoes
thrown down for three years into a living grave
under a haystack where a Christian farmer kept

Poppa hidden. Since the war started Poppa
had been saving black market money,
so the purpose of the potato was to save
Poppa’s life in return for that money.
—

DORIS FERLEGER, former Montgomery County PA poet laureate, winner of the New Letters Poetry Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non Fiction Prize, among others, is the author of four volumes of poetry, Big Silences in a Year of Rain, (finalist for the Alice James Books Beatrice Hawley Award), As the Moon Has Breath, When You Become Snow, and Leavened. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, L.A. Review, and South Carolina Review. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a Ph.D. in psychology and maintains a mindfulness based therapy practice in Wyncote PA.