James Caton: 2 Poems

Numbers

          We're uncertain of life's worth
          on the slipping edge
                    ​— Hosam Maarouf

At Nuremberg, Jackson
revealed one human head,
severed, nameless,
shriveled beyond
a mother's recognition.

​It was liberated from
some Nazi’s desk,
you know the story.
Let's say the desk was
piled with numbers.

​No doves took flight
as he pulled away
the cloth.
Not even
doves symbolic
of excruciating peace.

​But a young man in
the chamber,
a guard let’s say,
hoped his thought was quiet,
invisible to God.

​His thought? The head
was in bad taste
as ornament. But
the head
says nothing,
could be clay
or not. Either way,
it sits, a thing

​dizzying
or not,
as he chose.

Rubble

          Native soil we say,
          but soil is debris.
                 ​— Irving Feldman

​Dust-soaked blood and
you know you’re close,
I imagine.
Words will emerge
later
in both of us.

​Rubble is as old
as walls, the dream that
I’m safe here.
Parapet,
temple,
your kitchen blooming
with steam— 
all fall down.

​The fever dream of
Meir Kahane
lapped at the flames
in Berdichev, vomits
them, as a dog
its own shit,
on Gaza.

​Lebensraum!
And why not? Anything
to keep them
satisfied
on the Pentagon’s
largest base.

​It's for the Pentagon,
Layla,
that you smolder
in your sleeper
under rubble.

James Caton is an emerging author. He recently completed work on a novel, The Salt, and is currently at work on a book of short stories as well as a book of poems, to be titled Nakba. He lives and writes in Ann Arbor.