THE LAST JEW IN VINNITSA

 by Roselyn Kubek

Detail showing the murderer now identified as Jackobus Omnen from the photograph known as "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa" Warning: Viewers will find the original photo at the link provided disturbing.

At Last, a Name for the Murderer in a Holocaust Photo. —The New York Times, November 28, 2025

Now he has a name.

Or we have it—

Finally we know what to call the person 

whose ennui pulled a trigger in front of:

     one photographer

     two dozen standing-bored

     so many piled bodies

We learn this murderer 

was once a school teacher

who still teaches though armed 

with a different lesson

      Jackobus Omnen

How pleasant to roll that 

off history’s tongue

to store in the sepia of then

It’s a name full of roundness 

like the anonymous circle 

of witnesses

like the shallow pit where 

a man sits on the edge

perpetually anticipating 

the end

Chin raised

he watches us all

from the bottom 

of a photograph

and waits to become the last.

Roselyn Kubek is a teacher and a New England poet whose work has been featured in a number of publications and venues including, most recently, Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope series and the Maine Poets Epistolary Poetry Exchange. 

THE FARRIER OF TIME

by Ian Randall Wilson

“Death blue butterfly” by mirrurin at Deviant Art

It's like waking from the dream of an accident

into the accident, real and sure to be bloody,

the day pulling hard from the list of extinct thoughts

suddenly revived after 50 years.

It's easy to be furious with the ones

who read the entrails but ignored

the auguries, secure in their belief

the drum would not beat this day,

forest sending smoke rings back in time,

and yet I find I am furious with myself,

feeling at fault that somehow we let them—

I let them—turn the wheel

so the earth-mind must shift

toward thinking again

about bent wires and blood.

 

Except those endowed enough

to survive the ruins

and make it to the coasts

on damaged wings, the back alleys

will open for business

and the blue butterflies

will once again

die there.  How can it be

that the permanent road

now leads elsewhere?

 

Oh, the six are resplendent

in their black robes pretending

the sunset is not bleak.

They hold up their hands

which they claim are not stained,

the rest of us stand covered in ash.

 

When they entered the pit, they told us

the air was settled, vowed all was settled.

How good of them, how good

for them in their bribed cabins,

their false and active gods arranged,

watering the Chrysanthemum.

Ian Randall Wilson has poems published in many journals including Puerto del Sol and Alaska Quarterly Review. His first full-length collection is entitled Ruthless Heaven. He has an MFA in poetry and in fiction from Warren Wilson College. By day, he is an executive at Sony Pictures.

NO BOTTOM

by Ed Shacklee

There is no bottom here, I’ve found:
the water’s swirling round and round.
We’re going down the drain, I fear,
for there’s no bottom here.

We have a circus but no bread.
There is no heart, there is no head,
the end, however, can’t be near:
there is no bottom here.

Our leader leads us from behind.
He tells us that we shouldn’t mind
attempts to make us disappear,
for there’s no bottom here—

there’s only down, and down we sink,
too dumb to care, afraid to think.
What’s brinkmanship without a brink?
Don’t worry, for it’s very clear
there is no bottom here.


Ed Shacklee is a public defender who lives on a boat in the Potomac River.  His first collection The Blind Loon: A Bestiary was published by Able Muse Press in 2017.