(would you like to read to me in the soft
would you like to enter me in the soft

would you like a lunch of me in the soft
in its long delirium?)

The good news is we have each other.
The bad news is Kalashnikov assault rifles,

submachine guns, pistols, ammunition,

four boxes packed with thousands of small steel balls.

~

The morning world in crisp relief—

clotheslines, windowsills, sunflowers in sun

even after a night like that

even after the worst night

the Mediterranean sparkling obliviously

abandoned poussettes on the promenade

bodies on asphalt, a certain nausea of sound

beneath the streets inside the metros

up on the rooftops something is cooking

~

keep the doors
locked windows
closed coast clear
and don’t be soft
at the airport, café,
club, restaurant,
concert, in church

(when shots
punctured the room
when explosions
smoked and clouded
he was all alive, spasmodic
like a fish in floodwaters she)

~

Let’s resume.

It was a stifling summer

and marred by slaughter.

I rolled over and tried to sleep
thinking mostly of self-preservation,
how it makes everything else irrelevant,

follows us around the block

with its narrow anger

at the wild risk of it, all living things.

By which method
shall I become formless,
or reach a final form?

The odds constantly changing,
the moon a low smudge on black
and the roads all closed.

Soldiers pacing their new stations on the square
as if safety were calculable,
as if there were a plan.

~

And so we’ve become ourselves

again in the old style side by side

in fragility, beside the pantheon crypt

doing nothing as if for a reason.

We’ll lose to gravity dark and pure

beyond what can be replenished beyond

what can be beyond, a plot of nerves gone under

(the musk scent and filthy pile we’ll be).

But we were lustrous from time to time,

in a garden in a city in a wood melodious with pine.

Blur of speech in the gullet, gale of want in the throat.

Woke up warm tomorrow in a spot of sun.

A flesh. A wild alive all only.

those nazis, they knew what to do with a soft

those nazis, they knew what to do with a soft

(Frankfurt)

~

I don’t know
what’s so neo
about neo-nazis

they seem a lot
like the old
nazis to me

shouting jews will not replace us
in charlottesville
in frankfurt

marching by my grandmother’s
house shouting
pretty much the same

ought we to get going now
galloping seems
a good idea

~

Frankfurt, 1938, Oma was a soft target
got her soft the fuck out of there

smuggled out her egg purse to become us
and so it ended and so it didn’t end

(if she’d been distracted, if she’d lived blindly,
if she’d been dazed or dullard or out of luck)

kissed her dog goodbye, snuck candy
in her pockets, coins in her shoes

ran past the door of her school
her doctor’s office

her favorite park, the house

where the boy she secretly loved lived—