CW: Sexual Assault, Holocaust/Genocide mention, Suicide Mention, Self Harm

1) 

Location: Kitchenette, apartment in West St. Paul, 70 gaping decades after genocide, no, survival, no, the invention of the Atlantic?, no, what is the opposite of silence?

Time: what is the opposite of childhood? I recall street-lights shining in the curtains, a musty orange color, like the taste of wormy pears. I recall my neighbor’s television-sounds, newscasters muttering through the wall. I recall feeling hungry. 

This reminds me of the time I held a bread knife to the base of my penis, how those pubic hairs rose like little Nazi salutes, how that sacrum looked like tired old Goering, wrinkles caging his face. Childhood fantasies alternated between killing and being killed, tattooing and being tattooed, raping and being raped. 

Location: grandparents’ expensive apartment, sneaking into Papa’s bedroom, noticing his nightstand full of shiny wrappers of Hershey’s Kisses; they reminded me of false teeth winking inside the grins of men. 

Time: middle of the afternoon, Sabbath, no, the opposite of Sabbath, moments after his latest PTSD episode, my wrist still bruised blue, how his body, upon Return, became just one syllable moving through the living room. I swear he returned invisible. I swear he returned with gills. 

I remember watching my grandfather sleep, the dark eternity of his open mouth, the way he snored like a sea creature seeking the source of sunlight. 

2) 

I am sick of my dick writing 

about the Holocaust. His forearm:  

series of blackfish, cave paintings. I wonder

if archeologists will find my dick Papa’s forearm 

and wonder what ink means? I wonder 

if archeologists will still wear those gender-assigned clothing Indiana

Jones hats and carry State IDs little brushes and picks – or if everything

will be lasers. Will they understand tattoos? My body Papa’s 

forearm a Rosetta Stone containing a language of grief? How do we trans 

late violence? How do we speak of the body grief

in American dialects? I know – as a rumored scientific 

man fact, 

measured and re-measured, proven in the lab of childhood my grandfather’s eternal

suffering – that there is no word for forgiveness in the language of surviving having survived. 

That concept is foreign to the forearmed. That concept does not exist

in the culture of sea creatures; Berlin sunlight is an exotic source. 

3. 

Location: Berlin (read: the opposite of my grandfather’s body)

Time: in the 1920’s (read: moments before a gaping decade wound)

provided sex-reassignment surgeries with taxes (read: for free). Sundown

was not yet shaped like an inverted triangle, gendered pinked. Somehow

we existed in finery, wearing our bodies like lavish furs, customizing

our mouths to fit the shapes of language. We fit perfectly inside of German

mouths. We slept soundly upon Polish

tongues. We built little apartments inside Austrian

molars. Even Adolf Hitler once used

the word Schwuchtel to create suicide wounds, but we knew scars

glowed with sunlight.