The Soil of Birkinau: 1942
Blesssed are you, Adonai,
Our God, ruler of the Universe,
Who has created everything
For your glory
I wish my occipital lobe had failed me more than it did:
that cognitive function, that feeling that maybe we’d live
or die together; that feeling that I was thinking,
that I was Jewish, that nothing made sense,
and that made sense.
Sour spits projected onto my toes
because they took my shoes
because I guess they needed them too,
rotted, stinking shoes in piles, wheelbarrowed
and dumped into one of several gaping, gasping trenches.
Every olfactory moment brewed sense between my eyebrows:
over time as I imbibed and painfully regurgitated truths
of the wreak of the trench, in my hair,
on my blistery and impassionate hands.
With steel-sliced and labored fingers,
I can feel my sister’s bloodied shirt, the star hanging
from my mother’s neck, crimson and trying to mean something
in trenches. I’d scream to know I had been born
Adonai, Adonai, kill me so that I may not live
but keep smoking lives alive so mine may not end.
But if I couldn’t see—couldn’t see syncopated diamonds
begetting steps taken and breaths skipped in Sosnowiec
I’d be breathing in guttural stenches, sanctioning realities
I’d rather step on, irregular waste I’d rather ignore
so it’s not Chanka’s cloths, her mother’s chain, the blues of her eyes
in puffs, permeating the dirt, and dying with smoky earth,
beneath my bones, raised by hips and scraps of legs.
I wish I’d forget that she made me see
but I cry Adonai because looking while smelling kills
in trenches, I wish to find her whispering
that it’s not real, we’re not there, we’re not there
in trenches, she touches me
and holds my finger out to stars that aren’t there.
I heave exhaust, sinking in the imaginary air
It’s like we’re there again
Every time I think I’m sleeping
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