LEGACY LEANS IN

by Ronna Magy

 

Touring towns along the Danube, my rough Jewish boots trample cobblestone streets. Inset in sidewalks, brass stumble stones naming townsfolk murdered during World War II. Along the waters, a somber synagogue carved with perished names, marked and unmarked moss-covered graves.

At Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp skeletal yellow-starred Jews, pink-triangled gays, Spaniards, Poles, and Russians worked until dead. Non-Aryans stacked like canned fish in barracks at winter degrees. Prisoners chiseled granite, lugged 100 lb. rocks up steep stairs. Stumblers on the “Stairs of Death,” “Parachute jumpers” flung to their deaths. Inside brick buildings, gas lines rusted concrete. Weak prisoners marched in for hot showers. Chemical death.

The camp, above town, disguised behind forested hills. Our guide reveals a letter from a neighboring farmer’s wife who objected to watching prisoners shot, then thrown off cliffs. She made this request: Could the atrocities be staged elsewhere so she wouldn’t have to see.

What happens to democracy when hatred and evil link arms? It’s not news to us what’s happening in the US.   Adelanto   Atlanta   Aurora   Bismark   Battle Creek   Brooklyn    Casper    Calexico    Chicago    Des Moines    Detroit    El Paso   Honolulu   Houston   Leavenworth   Lewisburg   Miami   New Orleans   Newark   Philadelphia  Tacoma  Youngstown. Caged migrants: 70,000  already detained.

Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres   Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz   Victor Manuel Diaz   Heber Sanchaz Domínguez.  All dead. An unmarked black SUV just screeched by tinted windows rolled down. Masked men shouldering guns.

Ronna Magy’s recent writings appear in SWWIM Every Day, Cholla Needles, Made From Midnight, Rise Up Review, Women in a Golden State, The Los Angeles Press, Persimmon Tree, Writers Resist, and Sinister Wisdom. An alumna of the Napa Valley Writers Conference, Ronna’s curated readings of seasoned queer women poets for the Outwrite and Circa Queer Histories Festivals. She’s a retired ESL instructor and textbook author. 

REMEMBERING NICOLAI

by Bob Stanley

Stock vintage photo.

I didn’t forget about the old photo of Nicolai,
or what grandpa said about him,
that tears came easily to his eyes,
and that his oils of snow-capped mountains,
with rivers running behind blue pine trees sold well.
Grandpa told me Nicolai loved men instead of women: he always did.
The Nazis had taken him one evening
as he was going out dressed for the theater,
dressed in a long black coat and fedora.
They took him to camp Mauthausen,
robed him in striped pajamas and gave him a pink triangle for a name.
At the end of the war,
the allies liberated the camp,
but Nicolai was found naked and dead,
nothing left of him but a winter’s husk and dead raven’s eyes.

I often wonder looking back,
if Nicolai and the men he loved
were as happy as the men I saw dancing,
on the paper mache float in the Gay Pride parade:
with their asses exposed in black leather chaps,
red jock straps, green feathered boas, lipstick and heels
and sun-tanned smiles?

Grandpa died last week.

So now, looking at this old photo
of Nicolai and Grandpa at the beach as young men
I’m left to wonder
how I shall pour out what is left of my life.


Bob Stanley lives in Pickerington Ohio and works for the Bureau of Motor Vehicles as a civil servant. Personal heroes include brother Joey, brave companion in the fiery walk of the family past and what is to come, and his late mother Lillian who demonstrated both the healing and destructive power of imagination, and his father Jack who instilled the value of hard work.  Bob is currently working on his first novel and his first collection of poetry.  Bob likes to remind people that Franz Kafka and Herman Melville were also civil servants.