EYE OF A NEEDLE

You must put the thread through the eye
of the needle to get started, before
you turn on the machine, fulfill your quota.
One hundred forty-six young
immigrant women died in the Triangle
Shirtwaist fire in New York City.
Their employer locked the fire escapes
to keep them from stealing. There is a paranoia
amongst the rich—even a billionaire
can fear a pregnant woman hunkering
in shade after she’s crossed the Rio Grande.
He called her an animal—a man so afraid
of people of color, he warned they just might
eat the dogs and cats and geese of owners
who had purchased them with good money.

Steve Nolan

TRACT HOUSES

On a bus
bound for Sachsenhausen—
passengers lulled by full bellies—
Wurst, Schnitzel, gravy: flesh dipped in its fat.
I do not eat.
Not because of kashrut,
but because of the animals—
a vow I wear like a violet shawl of prayer.

Around my neck,
a star.
Not branded,
but worn with the pride
of one who has survived
by remembering.
The tour guide speaks
in clipped German syllables,
her measured voice softening horrors with precision.
Her words: 20,000, Klinkerwerk,
arbeit macht frei.
Her tone: neutral,
while I feel anything but.

I imagine the camp before I see it,
its air thick with ghosts,
its earth covered
by ash and bone.
I expect to be shattered
by gas chambers, barracks.
But it is not the camp that rips me open.

It is the tract houses,
bright and bland,
around the barbed wire.
Ordinary homes,
behind which people
lived their lives
while ovens smoked.
It’s a paycheck.
It’s a duty.
The ease of complicity.
My stomach turns before I enter.

The lesson:
atrocity does not howl.

It shares a fence with a neighbor
who smiles and waters his lawn.
The sign in his yard proclaims
God bless America
beneath a flag that gloats.

“Never again,” I think—
the prayer of the descendants.
But then I see the cracks
where history bleeds through.

Brown-skinned fathers
in orange jumpsuits,
detained for paperwork,
for skin.
Karim Salem—
my neighbor,
gone since the day
he went to renew his papers,
his wife waiting,
his daughter asking why.

The silence is deafening.
Neighbors shrug.
Acquaintances parse semantics—
“It’s not the same,” they say,
no ovens, no trains.
But I know the shape of this shadow.
I see the gators in the water,
eyes just above the surface,
waiting for the feast.

History is here again,
dressed in new uniforms.
And the bus rolls on,
carrying the sated, 
the heartbroken—
those who must break the silence.

Heidi J. Dalzell