aunt bird recalls the ladder of the righteous she observed during the war

For Feiga Maler, 1919–1942, who died in the Kraków Ghetto

Along the ladder of the righteous, on the rungs
between evil and good, a dusk of pigeons smeared the sky

and the language of joy was penniless, a vagrant.
God was a runaway child who ate the earth with a spoon

and licked the gooseflesh of our crowded room
so full our shadows couldn’t lie down, standing

for weeks around a candle’s nervous bird of light.
Along the ladder of the righteous, on the rungs

between evil and good, we threaded worry
through the eyes of needles. Chana rubbed

smuggled perfume on her wrists, the scent of poppies
even on her breath. Yakov printed letters of the alphabet

on his palm with a lump of coal and for each character
he remembered, he mouthed a gun’s hollow boom.

Leah mistook stones for beans. She stirred them in a pot.
And we wondered if the sky would stop.

Along the ladder of the righteous, on the rungs
between evil and good, internees scratched their names

with their fingernails on detention center walls,
while customers on the city streets haggled for marzipan

and chocolate, dumplings and live geese, streets where
people dissolved like sugar cubes on the tongues of rain.

Originally published in Bat City Review Issue 16

Yerra Sugarman’s third poetry collection, Aunt Bird, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Her earlier collections are Forms of Gone and The Bag of Broken Glass. She has received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, among other honors, and holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio.