by Catherine Gonick
Cold Spring, NY, October 15, 2022
The trees were at their red and orange height
as we drove toward our town and had to stop
for a parade. A police car parked sideways
on the road blocked our way. At first
we thought the line of cars was a funeral
procession, until we noticed the drivers
and passengers were all boys, some standing
to wave American flags from top-down convertibles,
open moon-roofs, the backs of 4 x 4s. They smiled
as they passed, and a few saluted like Nazis.
The next week, the editor of the local paper said it sounded
like the high school parade held the previous Friday.
But we’d seen this procession the next day. The police
said they knew nothing about it. As far as we knew,
only my husband and I had seen it. I saw just one
Hitler salute, but he saw three. Afterward
we kept driving to a birthday party for a friend,
a Holocaust survivor still going strong at 95.
He told the guests about the night the doorbell rang
and his father was taken to Dachau. We reported
the parade we’d just seen, which already felt like a dream.
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Forge, Live Encounters, Soul-Lit, and Amethyst Review, and in anthologies including Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and, forthcoming, Rumors, Secrets, Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She lives in Cold Spring, NY and works in a company that slows the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.