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BUBBLE BATHS & CRYSTAL METH
Bubble baths and crystal meth and other forms of
what amount to cognitive attempts to touch the soul
are not enough for me, although conceptually and
sometimes actually they used to seem to be. But now
I get my POW directly from the source: the alpha
and omega jackpot of the course. I look – and there’s
the miracle. Sometimes it’s spherical: I’m in a spinning
circle fully three-dimensional: a zone in which sharp
angles are unknown. Sometimes it seems more like
consensual ménage-à-mille – a glorious unending multi-
bodied orgy full of pleasurably strange sensations and
activity: at times the shock presents as an imploding clock –
a Dali-esque reminder that if we invented Time (and
hoo! we did) we could invent alternatives far more sublime –
and truer to the prurient experience of ogling Eternity:
close enough for us to sense its meat. Sometimes
the miracle is sweet as blood would be to vampire bats:
compulsively pursued, fantastically delicious but not
made of anything you knew, could know. Sometimes
the blast and thunder blow capriciously – bursting like
a random fireworks display: pretty little neurons falling
like confetti in a shaken snow globe: indiscriminately
fleecy, happy, white. Bubble baths and crystal meth
and other forms of what amount to cognitive attempts to
touch the soul can’t touch what really makes you whole:
it’s right there in the obvious – the stuff on which a gnat
subsists: the endlessly surprising clues that we exist.
Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett)
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COFFEE WITH MENGELE
in memory of Maria Emma Bussar
We worked at the same hospital
early in the war.
He was a doctor, I was a nurse.
Some mornings we would have Kaffee und Kuchen,
a cigarette and a little chat.
Ach, he had the most beautiful eyes,
dark-lashed, dark-browed, and piercingly blue.
I enjoyed our breaks together.
He was a fascinating man.
I liked being a nurse.
Sometimes he would speak a bit
about his other job,
and tell me how the patients were caged like wild creatures.
He spoke of his research
enthusiastically,
his eyes burning like a saint’s, like an angel’s.
But my eyes could not see past
a person in a cage
and my ears could not hear for wondering.
His eyes seemed less sehr schon;
I felt a bit beklommen –
how do you say – uneasy?
After the war we left for the States.
Josef, they said, left Auschwitz and
went west, pretending to be just a soldier.
I heard he was a prisoner of war
but the Allies released him, not knowing who he was.
He divorced and remarried,
moving around South America,
denying the experiments until he died.
Who knows what was true? The surgeries,
the twins, the amputations, the dwarves?
I cannot think about it too closely.
I became a nurse to help,
not to hurt, or even know of hurt
if I could help it.
My sleep is much deeper
if I do not think too much.
They say he tried to change the color of the iris
by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes.
I wonder if he made them
as blue as his own?
Mitchell Geller (EDowson)
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