HANGING THE BONES
on my maternal grandparents who survived the holocaust
parchment walls
sinew lines stretch
hanging the bones
calcified tomes
translate trochanter nodes
her trauma unfolds
in bruised flesh
riverbank conception
an undelivered letter
from the rock carrier
delivering his heart
big in the gaunt cage
placed in a displacement camp
quarry hands heal
hers are beet red
no sweetness
in that sugar factory
but granny bakes the sweetest cakes
and candy grows in grandpas pockets
ears still ring
the drum of the Dresden bridge
her sweet body smoking
skeletons walking
young men guard the bones
young men burn the bones
and flesh
young men whip the bones
no 70’s psychology test needed
no Zimbardo
evil is a slippery slope
Abu Ghraib
old news
read the bones
dangling
moving in the million
last breaths
that never were
a low chankling song
ghost party
dances midst
bone chimes
soul winds
unable to reflesh
fragmented
she lived in the cracks between
the walls of a foreign suburbia
her hands still beet red
he the elegant miner
deposited disaster
in a liver
that turned to cancer
we burned their bones
ashes tucked together
on an island in the pacific
sea salt rain
a tidy hedge
ash condos await us all
