Matter Of Heritage

Painting My Nails Red While Watching
"German Concentration Camp Field Study"

If every woman really does adore a fascist I stare,
transfixed, at a forbidden grey screen. How
can I ever explain this makes me feel so alive,
a seventy-year-old flicker of bodies bent
in on themselves, such forlorn dolls, such
abandoned shoes and glasses, and lusts,
as I lacquer my nails a disturbing red for you.
"Romantically involved," the only color in the room,
it bullies its way towards a mute rage of black pits
where mouths and eyes used to be.
Arbeit Macht Frei, work will set you free,
pounded like a measure of music, that death march,
across an ironic iron gate and I think,
eager breath on my nails to blow them dry,
how lucky I am to be alive.
How lucky I am to be born too late to wear a yellow star,
too late for my great, wide-set eyes, the bump
on my nose to belie an inherited calling card of grief.
Tonight in simple terms we speak of ennui,
but I am grown into this earth, planted,
part flower, part weed, mixed-up half-breed
who still wonders how it would feel to run
my painted pinkie nail across the sig rune of one SS.
Victory! Victory! What a lie. What a farce.
What sick protection. You seem to bring
this sickness out in me. Ennui?
This pining for the trouble burrowed
deep inside you from a land that should seem almost safe.
That pasteurized American humanity
I have longed to crawl inside,
that confounding blonde symmetry,
that key to the kingdom of the blue Aryan eye.
If you are the Master Race
I will gladly be your slave anytime.
Big nosed, dark eyed. "Romantically involved,"
this red paint shaded as the blood between my legs,
the signal that my body still beats in the rhythm of life,
ready for you to push and pull me into your preferred shape
because for us it's never really too late. Arbeit Macht Frei,
that iron gate. Maybe even the work
of this brand of love can set you free?
I still come to you with no desire for babies or rings.
But I do, in my particular way, both choose and take you.
Part of me knows we thrive best on our secrets.
Out in the open, sometimes this sort of thing dies.
So you will keep me hidden, that Jew writing poems
in your attic about ennui, that playmate-in-waiting
still waiting. Our palpable world, this February,
Spring, that rollicking green liberation still far off,
our bloody war of valentines stowing away
to their perceived freedoms on a different kind of train.