The Woman Outside of Oborniki

There’s a pyramid of shoes on the horizon

next to another pyramid made out of horses.

 

Adolf Eichmann went to the washroom

and he didn’t say much, to our disappointment.

 

She called out in anger at the normalcy

of the Nazi sitting across from her couch.

 

My grandmother’s mother was pregnant

while she made bullets outside of Oborniki.

 

She remembers hearing about the motorcycles

and hearing about the ashes on the clotheslines.

 

Once she awoke underneath a pyramid of shoes

and she told me she thought they were horses.

 

Outside they threw books into these huge piles

as if to say that they didn’t fear books or art.

 

The horse stumbled into her dreams, back in August.

She looked at the prints it left in the sand. U’s.

 

On the horizon there was a pyramid of horseshoes

and motorcycles blowing black ghosts into the air.

 

She awoke howling and babbling about horses

and we dabbed a wet washcloth on her forehead.

 

“Where is my husband?” she said.

But we didn’t know her husband,

except for a passing glance, a black puddle on the street,

where a mannish cheekbone turned us into a half-orphan.

We didn’t know her husband.

 

She kept dreaming of horses and shoes

and the faces that were just empty skins.

 

She talked in her sleep once and it was about shoes.

“Tie them up. Tie them. You’ll lose them to winter.”

 

She tied invisible laces while she smiled in a dream,

remembering that she owned shoes in another life.

 

A dud fell in the cobbled alleyway between her and her neighbours’ house once

and they laughed the next day about how there must’ve been a Jewish alley cat.


Also by Ethan Birch

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