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. 

"A MESHUGGENEH IS ON THE LOOSE"

by Judith Terzi

& I'm sitting here with my morning

coffee watching a cockatiel 

slip tail feathers through his beak. One by

one. The ends have become ragged

with so much preening. "Rumba Poderosa"

by the band Incendio is playing 

on a cd. The bird begins to sing along, 

dance on his perch. He scurries

to the left, then rushes back to his usual

place in front of his big purple

mirror. You see, he imagines the music 

emanates from his constant mirror 

buddy. His identical twin. The bird is in love 

with his own image. I am in love 

with the bird. He sways back & forth to any 

music, but especially to a Latin beat. 

A rumba. A bolero. A tango. It's a kind 

of bird praying, a bird davening, 

you might say. While all this sashaying 

is going on, a committee is meeting 

in a sedate space on the opposite coast. 

You could say the nine members 

of the committee have been placed in a different 

kind of cage. One with carafes of

hot water & coffee, sweet rolls, bottled water.

No ladders, no pinwheels, no miniature 

crystal balls. The committee is subpoenaing 

witnesses, scratching every surface 

for any evidence anywhere data can be found. 

The bird is biting its cage bars in between 

chirps to "Rumba Poderosa." Rumba of power 

in front of his own image that he adores. 

I think he's calling me. I hear a wolf whistle 

while I'm writing this. "Let's get it 

over with," he's saying. "What's the holdup? 

A meshuggeneh is on the loose." 

Now he's started to preen his feet. He's biting 

his nails. The music has stopped. I'm 

eating a whole wheat bagel with cream cheese. 

I'm having a second cup of Joe. 

Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay) as well as of five chapbooks, including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus). Her poetry appears in a wide array of journals and anthologies. A poem, "Ode to Malala Yousafzai," was included on a "Heroines" episode of BBC/Radio 3's "Words and Music." She taught French for many years in Pasadena, California, as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria. A new chapbook, Now, Somehow, will appear later this year. 

TRAJECTORIES #7

by David Chorlton

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photo and Video by Getty

It’s such a pleasant and deceitful
day, with the afternoon light
lying back on the green
side of the mountain
and quail in a covey scurrying
for cover as the hearings wind
down until tomorrow. The local Red-tail
prowls the atmosphere,
circling the golf course
pond while pigeons
flock for safety in numbers. Witnesses
appear one
at a time, exposed to words
that fly from a questioner’s mouth
and don’t know
where to land. Is good the bright
and bad the shadow, or
the other way around? It all depends
which side a person’s on,
and the small birds know their place.
Seventy-three degrees; not a cloud
in sight; the whistleblower’s name
is still a secret; there is
no wind to turn the turbine
vent that complains every time it blows,
aching as only
metal can.

David Chorlton  is a long time resident of Phoenix, who loves the desert and its wildlife but can't quite stay away from watching public issues unfold. He recently produced a long poem, Speech Scroll, which will surface in the not too distant future thanks to Cholla Needles Press.

THEY CAME

by Robert Knox

First they came for the immigrant children
And we looked away
Because the Leader's toady told us, "Those are not
our children"
And we looked at our own children,
and were reassured

Then they came for the people who cover their heads
or pray too much
And again we looked away
Because we were not Iranians, or Iraqis, or Gazans,
or children of the West Bank detained indefinitely without charges
And, as the man said,
those are not our children

Then they came for the abused, and those who accused their abusers,
and for the accusers' advocates,
and for those who fought against their abusers,
breaking into their hidden armories to take away their guns
            But we looked away, and jested at the comedie humaine,
because we were not ourselves the victims of abuse
or the advocates for the abused,
and, after all, we are "not his type"

Then they came for the ones who would never
play ball with Der Leader
The ones who would always be trouble
because they were cheated out of their land
or, perchance, had been enslaved
or who had once owned a country that the slave-owners wished
            to possess for themselves
or who, we feared, were willing to work
            for too little money
or who loved the wrong people
or who were unwilling to remain in their positions
            and to perform the tasks
for which they had been created by the distant Creator—
those varied and disobedient creations
of that stable genius
            somewhere in the sky

And then because no one else remained standing
            in our diminished patria,
neither advocates,
nor scribblers with their pencil over the ear,
nor Enemies of the People with their hand-held devices,
nor party of the workers
nor defenders of the beaten, humiliated and disappeared

able to kick the ball from his feet,
nothing was left for us to do
but to lay our own bodies before His feet
            As the painted, spiked, and horny-headed demons of extinction
cheered, and drank, and laughed, and danced upon the bodies
of their victims
and ran up history's score

Boston area writer Robert Knox is a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual in which his poems are regularly published. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award for poetry books published in 2017. Also a fiction writer, his novel Suosso's Lane, a story of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, was published in 2016. His novel Karpa Talesman recently won a competition for speculative fiction and will be published by Hidden River Arts.