The Fall of Man
The Fall of Man.
We study the Holocaust at school.
“The Catastrophe, ”
the Jews have deemed it
in their language.
I write, “Shoah” on the board.
We watch a video.
They gasp at the pictures, the horror.
Nancy Bowman
ever the patriot, affirms:
“I’m glad I live when and where I do. We would never let something like that
happen nowadays.”
I flip on CNN when I get home:
The knobs of knees and forearms
cut angles from the thick, dusty air;
the inner thighs—
the part we American women
watch so closely
for overgrowth—
have sunken away and,
if the legs were pressed together,
a gaping oval would still separate them there.
the hairless arms are riddled with
sharp bone
in places no bones should be.
tainted white buds
of infectious, curdled mucous
spring up, spotted, across what may have been
shins—or necks, once—
like aged yellow blossoms
sprouting from the potatoes
I was saving for a special meal...
while I gorged on the other seventy-five dollars of groceries
I bought
for the week
They starved.
the balls of knotted brown rubber
the tangled configurations of
a crooked finger here,
a distended, vacant bowl of something like a stomach there,
all joints and
wiry turns,
lie balled up in that corner there,
another pile of knots in this corner here—
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poem by Jae Jae
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