Free That Said by Jane Shore Page B

she’ll return alive
from a fate too horrible to say aloud,
a witch’s hut built from her victims’ bones.
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I’m the one who commands the hunter to kill,
and cut out my daughter’s heart
and bring it back, posthaste, as proof.
I will salt it, and eat it.
I do this as a present for my daughter.
And like the good girl I started out as,
I mind my manners.
I lick the plate clean, lick it
clean and shiny as a mirror—
Time’s talking mirror—who is my daughter.

The Sound of Sense
Through the heat register I can hear
my daughter reading in the room below,
eating breakfast in her usual chair
at the kitchen table, two white pages
of her open book throwing the blinding
pan of sunlight back at her downcast face.
I hear her chirping up and down the scale
but I can’t decipher a single word
as Emma learns to read. She’s in first grade
and has to read a new book every day,
a weight she carries between school
and home in her backpack, in a Ziploc
baggie, with her lunch—a nibbled sandwich
squashed into an aluminum foil ball
she’s crumpled hard as a chunk of pyrite.
She unzips the baggie and out falls
“The Farm,” eight pages long, more pamphlet
than book. Not much happens in the plot.
A farm, a barn, a boy, a cow that moos a lot.
The words are hard, but Emma sounds them out
one at a time, the O’s both long and short—
Cheerios bobbing in a lake of milk
in which her spoon trails like a drunken oar.
This morning her father, coaching her,
clears his throat, knocking his cup against
what?
—I hear it clatter but can’t make it out.
“Hurry up,” he shouts, “or you’ll miss the bus!”
I hear his imperative clearly enough,
but in the raised volume of her reply
the words are lost, garbled, caught in the throat
of the register’s winding ducts and vents.
In an hour or so, when sunlight moves on,
a film will glaze the soured milk, like frost,
where the sodden O’s float, life preservers.
Now, over muffled clinks of silverware,
clattered plates, running water, morning din,
the sound of sense resumes its little dance.
I hear my daughter turn the title page,
then silence, then a spurt of words, false start,
hesitation, a spondee of some sort,
then an iamb, then an anapest, then
a pause, another iamb—that’s The End.
Then the scrape of wood on tile as Emma
pushes her chair away and clomps upstairs
to change from her pajamas into clothes.

Holocaust Museum
As we filed through the exhibits,
Charlotte and I took turns
reading captions to Andy.
Herded into a freight elevator,
we rode to the top floor,
to the beginning of the War,
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descending floor by floor,
year by year, into history
growing darker, ceilings
lowering, aisles narrowing
to tunnels like the progress
of Andy’s blindness.
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In Warsaw, his parents owned
the Maximilian Fur Salon,
like a little Bergdorf Goodman—
doorman, and French elevator,
furs draped on Persian carpets
and blue velvet Empire chairs.
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Andy was one of the lucky ones—
playing cards in the back seat
of the family Packard as they
threaded through peasant villages,
trading mink coats for gasoline—
escaping Poland the day before
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the border closed. Unless Topper,
his German shepherd guide dog,
is at his side, it’s hard to tell
that Andy is blind. His blue eyes
look directly at you when you speak.
Today, his gray-bearded face, grave,
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as Charlotte and I described
photographs and artifacts, or read
quickly, in monotones, as if reciting
selections from a menu.
Something had to break me down—
the cattle car, crematorium door,
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the confiscated valises of Jews
piled high, dramatically lit
like a department store display.
It was a small snapshot of a girl—
shot dead, lying beside her parents
on the cobbled street, her hair
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as long as my eight-year-old’s,
her coat, about my daughter’s size.
People detoured around our little
traffic jam slowing