Ilyse Kusnetz
(USA)
Match Girls
In the factories of America
during the nineteenth century, girls
hired to make matches
would dip the match ends
into a chemical vat, then
lick the tips to make them stiff.
Phosphorous vapor
filled the air, a poison
about which no one warned them,
so when their teeth fell out,
and their jaws rotted
like bad fruit, it was too late.
It was not the first time
such things happened.
Bent at their work stations,
women in the eighteenth century
cured ladies’ hats with mercury.
Their legacy – blushing, aching limbs,
a plague of rashes, parchment-thin
pages of sloughed skin, curled
and cracked, minds deranged.
They could not know they shared a fate
with Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who
seeking eternal life, swallowed pills
laced with mercury. He built the Great Wall
and unified China, then outlawed all religions
not sanctioned by the state,
burned treatises on history, politics, and art.
Scholars who dared possess such things,
he buried alive. His body lies
in a vast mausoleum, guarded
by a terracotta army.
Of the factory girls, mouths opening
below earth, their bodies
burning like forbidden books,
we know almost nothing.
The War Years
Years my father paid a nickel for all-day movie Saturday at the People’s Cinema,
could hop a train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, bebop at the Royal Roost,
big band at the Paramount – Gene Krupa drumming like a demon,
Harry James on the horn, loving that wicked brass like it was Betty Grable
before he got busted for coke and she left him. Years my father
rounded the corner of Saratoga Avenue and Livonia on the way to synagogue,
or past his grandfather hovering on the stoop, cigarette a seesaw
bobbing at the old man’s lips. Years my father snuck into the Metropolitan,
memorizing the curves of Reclining Odalisque, how light fell
on Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, the way pharaohs in sarcophagi
reminded him of his tante’s old matryoshkas. Some afternoons, those years,
my father would stow his books and just wander –
his father, an arcade-owner, dead of a heart attack a week after LaGuardia
smashed the boroughs’ pinball machines, while Uncle Lou planned union strikes,
asking Don’t you think workers should have rights? My father popped
carnie balloons for cash, played keno under the IRT, dreaming egg creams,
Coney Island hot dogs, the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. And though the war
was everywhere, it wasn’t yet in the subtitled Soviet films
on the People’s screen, or in elevated train-cars, in bebop and big band,
in hushed and glowing galleries of brushstrokes and gilded graves
within graves, it wasn’t in the jangling recoil of ball after ball, as if that boy
could simply fold up entire years and slip them in his pocket,
walk off into the future humming Sleepy Lagoon, we’re deep in a spell, and
I’ll Get By, as long as I have you, as long as I have you.
Shrapnel
Here, a stagnant, nervous peace –
wood pigeons startling from crepe myrtles,
a lawnmower’s muffled buzz,
dead horses of bicycles in driveways.
Drunk on Jack, our neighbors argue
a familiar, unsolvable equation –
transmuted by the kindness of walls,
their voices echo down the block
a call to prayer, but tonight
the gods of suburbia are busy elsewhere.
Perhaps they are watching over our children
whose nature it is, when left alone too long
with their unbearable heaviness, to flail
against what injures them, to make of themselves
a kind of weapon. Why are we surprised
when teenagers tie firecrackers to a stray dog’s tail,
or strap rifles over their thin-boy shoulders
like messenger bags?
I think of Shrapnel setting targets in the field,
how each day he’d plan and test the limits
of his campaign, searching for a better way to inflict
damage, to expand the known radius of pain.
Hitler’s Alarm Clock, 1945
Für frieden freiheit und demokratie nie wieder faschismus millionen tote mahnen.
(For peace, freedom and democracy, never again Fascism, millions of dead admonish.)
– Written on a stone marker outside the house in Branau where Hitler lived as a boy.
No one saw the Jewish baker
snatch it from its bedside perch
and slip it into his overcoat –
Hitler’s childhood room preserved
down to a pair of gabardine
short trousers hanging over his chair.
My uncle carried that clock
the rest of the war, woke each morning
to its empty crowing, then took it
back to Brooklyn. Three years later
his toddler sons, twin prodigies,
stole it from his drawer,
dismantling the mechanism beyond repair –
every wheel and cog and spring
spread across the living room table
like airplane wreckage he’d seen –
a senseless array of parts,
forlorn as disassembled countries,
or memories whose narratives
lie lost and scattered like ash.
Archival Footage
Bodies piled like lumber, tottering bodies
withered to bone, lampshades fashioned
of human skin, some displaying tattoos;
shrunken-head paperweights, bisected heads
preserved and suspended in transparent resin
neatly labeled Two Halves of the Jew Brain.
Local townspeople trucked in. Now you can’t
tell the world you didn’t know. One woman
presses a handkerchief to mouth and nose,
a man dizzily cradles his chin. Look closely.
You can see history rooting in their bodies,
the horror of it pulling out their tongues.
Dina
After seeing Auschwitz prisoner Dina Gottliebova’s mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, painted for the camp’s child-victims, Josef Mengele – the Angel of Death – agreed to spare her family’s lives if she would sketch portraits of the Romani prisoners who underwent horrific torture at his hands.
Because she was chosen by the Angel of Death,
she remembers postcards from the dead –
hastily scrawled deceptions at gunpoint: “Greetings
from Waldsee.” “I am working. Follow us here!”
how the joyful replies brightened pyres, smoke letters
rumoring the fetid air, Arbeit macht frei –
and because she sketched dwarves, giants,
gypsies, twins killed simultaneously by formaldehyde
injection into the heart, prior to dissection –
a brown-haired girl whose eyes still
beg her silently, she remembers the Sonderkommando
carting away thousands of prisoners a day –
that inconceivable lattice of flesh – how even
in death bodies cling to one another.
In dreams, she watches endless ash
clot the Vistula, dyeing the water gray.
And when the war ends, she paints in thick,
heavy strokes – IG Farben, Zyklon B,
the seven dwarves of industry: Schmitz, Schnitzler,
Meer, Ambros, Bütefisch, Ilgner, and Oster –
she paints them convicted, paints them released,
profiles them, pen and ink: chairmen of Bayer
and Deutsche Bank, board members of
chemical companies, oil companies, smoke screen
of financial consortiums. For the rest of her life,
Dina paints self-portraits, tilts the mirror until she is
dark-haired, fair-skinned, untouched by age.
A kingdom of memory inside her.
Torture
(At the Ministry of Dreams)
Scientists are
experimenting
to determine
the effects
of sleep deprivation
upon the fly.
After dusk,
when all the flies
have eaten,
groomed, and
settled in
for the night,
the Sleep Nullifying
Apparatus shakes
the flies awake
ten times per minute.
The scientists
are also searching
for mutant flies
that require
no sleep. Down the hall,
vibrating in jars
are the dreams
they have collected
from humans,
legs wading
through molasses,
chickens devolving
into eggs,
eggs cracking open
to reveal a silk
slipper, a candlestick,
an ancient door.
In some dreams,
we open the door,
descend slowly
into cellars,
one below another –
or climb, instead
an infinite spiral.
At night, all the dreams
knock restless against
their prisons,
wanting, like children
to go home.
Hideyoshi Recalls for His Concubine the Origin of the Nose Tomb
“Mow down everyone universally, without discriminating between young
and old, men and women, clergy and the laity—high ranking soldiers on
the battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk, down to the poorest
and meanest—and send the heads to Japan.”
– orders given by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1598, to his troops invading Korea
Holds groaning with the burden of heads, soldiers hacked off noses instead
preserving them in brine, trophies enshrined in the homeland’s mounded earth,
Buddhist priests inveigling each noseless soul to seek repose, hundreds of thousands
wandering the spirit world unable to scent the earthly musk of their loved ones,
no hint of jasmine on the wind or green-bright bamboo, spared only the stench of their
own decay.
Hanazuka. Nose Tomb.
I thought later of Major Kovalyov’s dream,
his nose acquiring a life, success of its own, as it roamed the town blowsy with drink
and humor, vibrating with every freshly turned odor.
Say it, say it now – you are thinking
of poking it in somebody’s business, or, lovely nose, of spiting your face.
You once remarked my keen olfactory sense, declared I could smell a songbird’s darting
passage through centuries of unclaimed longing, the fine talc of history falling,
impossible rain, over all things, living and dead – whole and bereft.
Remember the royal court’s incense parties every spring? Tiny sandalwood boats
bobbing in the stream by the Philosopher’s Walk, rare spikenard and aloeswood,
cassia and clove piercing each soft, candlelit night.
After I am gone, tell
my enemies nothing. Let me wake to the buried sweetness of your skin, salt air,
the scent of light through high windows branching into warmth, to breathe you in,
should the world itself unmoor, this bed a silent raft, bearing us back to shore.
Holding Albert Einstein’s Hand
The corpse tree full of wasps.
Their razoring wings
outside my hospital window
in twos and threes, returning.
And so it goes, and so it goes –
a woman knows what a woman knows.
Words for losing places.
Hiraeth, saudade, morriña, dor.
The four chaise lounges of the apocalypse
wait for us on the sands, knowing
time is a rope, a deck of cards, an empty glass –
this place to sit by the ocean, watch
sanderlings run from the waves,
the long-fingered light of late afternoon.
Fear of disintegration
hollows out my bones.
I am becoming bird.
A sparrow flew into the house,
could not find its way out.
How it knocked, pinioned
fist, against the ceiling.
Years ago, my heart
was trapped like that,
and how the starlight
traveled toward me, though
I was already dead –
radiation to the marrow,
pharmakon swirling in my veins.
Everything dies.
Driving toward Venus,
I want to hear
what the sweet executioner says.
My bones like burning matchsticks.
Sometimes when I wake,
I’m shaping the world with my hands.
Sometimes when I sleep,
the world shapes me.
Once, I was energy
hiding inside the light,
or the shadow of light.
Love rooted us.
Together, exponential.
After, we spoke in tongues.
Our fingers cupped the universe like water.
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Bio:
Poet and journalist Ilyse Kusnetz is the author of Small Hours, winner of the 2014 T.S. Eliot prize from Truman State University Press, and The Gravity of Falling (2006). She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University and her Ph.D. in Feminist and Postcolonial British Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, the Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Stone Canoe, Rattle, and other journals and anthologies. She has published numerous reviews and essays about contemporary American and Scottish poetry, both in the United States and abroad. She teaches at Valencia College and lives in Orlando with her husband, the poet and memoirist Brian Turner.