9. there is a turning, we are inside
it ended in a hospital in center city Philadelphia
1:06pm on a wed in December, branches still barely
admitting their nakedness on the occasional young
tree stuck in a sidewalk square of dirt below
it hadn’t ended 35 years earlier as she left home
in pitch blackness, as she crawled over dead bodies
left lying in the street
or the day she was recognized on a train from Poland
to Germany clutching her tata’s promise, the best fake
papers money could buy while walking calmly into the
hive of the beast, her best chance, he had said, because
it was too late for hope of escape
that day she plunged her body past the heavy sliding train door
before it finished opening, before the polish girl her age could
reach the conductor to tell, before considering the impact on
her limbs of the hard earth whizzing by almost as quick as her
racing heart
that day she limped to a nearby farm
was given a place to rest while her ankle healed
and was never once told if they knew who she was
it didn't end the day she was invited to come along
to throw stale bread to the poor people and found
herself staring through diamonds of chain link and
barbed wire spirals into the starving eyes of her people
or months later the morning she found a room in a boarding
house for young single Christian women and a job teaching
sewing, the first of many mornings brushing by the tight
buttoned thick coats of gestapo officers
it still hadn’t ended 5 years later when, unable to remember
a day without watching every placement of her fork, every
sound on her tongue, every trembling cheek and watery eye
threatening to give her away, she was told the war was over,
when she arrived in a displaced persons camp to find out if
anyone she knew was still alive
it also didn’t end any of the times she told her teenage daughter,
“Hitler didn’t kill me but you will,” because her daughter refused to
do dishes after spending hours ironing her wavy black hair to hang
pin straight down her long back, insisting the hot soapy water would
reduce her perfect mane to a frizzy mess or because her daughter
refused to change out of jeans with gaping holes in the knees that
had been carefully carved with a cheese grater
it didn’t end, as her daughter wished it would, while being dragged
by her collar away from her friends, Yiddish curses flying at any
face that dared eye contact, or as her son harbored the same plea
while cradling his head from his mother’s blows
or the night she sat on an empty suitcase in her nightgown in the
middle of the street, yelling so all the neighbors could hear that
she was leaving her husband and her children because they were
so ungrateful
or any of the times her young daughter sat frozen on the smallest
corner of the bed trying to disappear from the terrors being recounted,
or the times her daughter stood staring outside the slammed bedroom door
wondering what she could have done to make her mother want to leave
her so badly, so often
she was 57 when the doctors told her they needed to remove her right lung then decided during the operation to leave a small piece behind, then told her it was a mistake, the cancer had spread to her left lung, and there was nothing more they could do
her daughter sat beside her hospital bed as she took her last breaths, they hadn’t seen each other in 6 years, since her daughter left home at 18, since she tracked her daughter down in Amsterdam using the PO Box return address on a letter and then wandered the streets of the city asking if anyone knew her, since she found the bar where her daughter worked, and was told by a steely expression she barely recognized to go home, but her daughter came back when she found out it was almost the end
she had been sitting by her mother’s bed every day for a week
had been sitting by her bed for hours already that day
when the monitor announced
the life in her mother’s body
had left
and before the nurses came to begin
preparing the body
to be moved, she stood up
and walked out
without a tremble in her cheek
or a trace of water in her eyes
