Sex and Murder Magazine

By Maggie Garavaglia

From an airy perspective
angels blur into monkeys,
blind, deaf, and dumb,
and roofs appear quaint
in this apathetic view.

Distressed red-wooden steps
(Oh the things we unload
when we tear down the barn)
seem like a ladder for God
to get the hell away.

He was evicted
from these garrisons,
from the pastoral settings
where blood-brick cottages
are tattooed with numbers;

Five for the Rom—
"Ring around the rosy"
Ten for the children—
Mengele had a pocket
full of cyanide posies.
Twenty for those dirty Jews—

"and we all fell down"

even God . . .

Smokehouses smoke
a Bavarian-air,
beside this little village.
Because proper German wives
couldn't be disturbed
with the cattle taken
from the cars to be slaughtered.

I think it’s called content,
in flower-boxed homes
on the better side of the street.

Those days were a Shoah
drizzling endlessly. Noons
looked like melancholy brochures,
as dingy men flicked the thought
of humanity from their shoulders.

And the Kaddish snowed its grey slate flakes.

"Just factory dust
coming out of their stoves",
we told ourselves, cozy,
sleeping safe those nights
in our own pass-over.