Aunt Bird

Yerra Sugarman

• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781954245143
• eBook ISBN: 9781954245228
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Aunt Bird is an astonishing, hybrid poetry of witness that observes and testifies to social, political, and historical realities through the recovery of one life silenced by the past. Within these pages, poet Yerra Sugarman confronts the Holocaust as it was experienced by a young Jewish woman: the author's twenty-three-year-old aunt, Feiga Maler, whom Sugarman never knew, and who died in the Kraków Ghetto in German-occupied Poland in 1942. In lyric poems, prose poems, and lyric essays, Aunt Bird combines documentary poetics with surrealism: sourcing from the testimonials of her kin who survived, as well as official Nazi documents about Feiga Maler, these poems imagine Sugarman's relationship with her deceased aunt and thus recreate her life. Braiding speculation, primary sources, and the cultural knowledge-base of postmemory, Aunt Bird seeks what Eavan Boland calls "a habitable grief," elegizing the particular loss of one woman while honoring who Feiga was, or might have been, and recognizing the time we have now.

Into the Shell of My Ear

Aunt Bird on What Happened to the Alphabet When the War Broke Out

The alphabet’s letters, she whispered, quivered.

Each one fell on its belly as bombs shocked the air

and rattled needles on fir tree branches.

Every panicked letter, with nothing but the clothes

on its back, dove into the river’s oily sinews.

The afternoon made of fever and stink.

Onto the bank, where weeds and thistles hissed,

she watched her neighbor, Joseph, haul a bloated Lamed,

burdock burrs stuck to its shirt, its face a bellows.

She saw a drowned Vov bob up-and-down as if it were tossing

in its sleep. It was tangled in wild lilac and mint,

buzzing clouds of flies above the writhing water.

That Vov’s skin was wrinkled and blue.

One of its feet clung to a sock and the sole of a boot,

shattered pinecones in its hair—

[Bone by bone, she remembered]

Bone by bone, she remembered

what it was like to change from body into light,

that the month of March had had no time for grief

and tore up her belly

until there were just black plums there

like ancient letters split in two—

Al-ef, B-et, Gi-mel, Da-let.

She recalled she had once lived

blowing into a glass cup,

that the eyes and ears of the already dead

would sprout each night

from the city’s starless womb.

And she dreamed, with elbows over tangled sheets,

of Limanowska, a curved eyebrow

of a ghetto street, paved with sighs,

sonorous with horseflies;

of the trolley on its hands and knees;

and of the Vistula’s liquid muscles.

Kraków, she thought,

when the moon ate

its own stony light,

you watched me

in love only once,

how my stomach shivered.

She Lived Amid the Tumult of an Occupied City

The war thrust its hand inside her.

It churned her belly and her heart.

And she lived amid the tumult

of an occupied city—a donkey led

by its bridle. Surrounded by the enemy

laughing about the names it had for Jew,

she asked herself how many ways

she could say madness and watched

soldiers round up those whose fingers danced

on the words of the Torah.

Those who sat under a café’s awning

stirring a cup of tea

were also rounded up; those bargaining

for beets piled high in the market;

those hanging wet sheets over balcony railings

were dragged from their apartments;

and those stopped to show identity cards

where peddlers sold bright balloons

were hauled away under the sharp beams

of streetlamps. Walls were peppered

with gunfire, bluebells speckled red.

Her people reeled along cobbled streets,

each person clutching a sack

containing things the enemy let them keep.

She was a short breath of a girl

who nursed an oriole

that sipped, in the mustard glow

of a Sabbath afternoon,

the crimson from poppies. A girl

who blamed herself for kissing

a boy beneath a tangerine moon

and for believing in anything

that didn’t rust—resistance,

revolt, joy (sometimes) and songs

not exiled from the spirit.

To hell with the enemy, she trilled

in Yiddish, her nostrils widening,

her voice tugging the air. And for singing

she blamed herself also, scolded herself

in a language rising from her lips like steam.

[Night after night, what she saw in her sleep]

Night after night, what she saw in her sleep:

an upside-down Havdalah candle like the one she lit

to usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath,

praying, “Blessed God, who separates light from dark. . .”

The candle in her dreams, like her real candle,

had four wicks and four braided strands of wax,

but produced no flames, only entrails of light.

And she dreamt God unhinged the constellations

and whisked away the stars. Uncreating. Uncreating.

The pitch darkness: a grave she couldn’t find a way out of.

And she dreamt she was a stone a crow lifted

and tucked into the wind:

a girl born to memory that hushes the sun

and takes the place of trees’ shadows.

When she woke, the war still raged

and the sky hardened into rock.

She wondered: why is God doing this?

And the thunder thundered: why are people doing this?

Despair swooping over her, her grief a kind of wingspan.

Delirious as the rain the river guzzled,

she became a stranger to herself,

circling her own shadow, searching for her beliefs,

her mind like shattered glass,

and the world stuck in her throat like a bone—

[The TV’s on mute; its cool glow scrubs the room]

The TV’s on mute; its cool glow scrubs the room. I’m at my computer, picturing my aunt with no suffering inside her, drinking milky coffee, and eating sponge cake under the striped awning of a Kraków café.

The 1938 city square gleams like a forehead. Nothing yet splits the voices from the streets. The rain of gunfire is still far away. Horse-drawn carriages rim sidewalks, bells stitched to reins clinking. The moment spreads out like the fingers of lamplight stroking shop windows. My aunt has many things to say, peeling the skin from her ideas.

Later, when time capsizes, she’ll feel the hammer of loose heat the one summer ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• [I have nothing to see her with]
• Aunt Bird
• Once
• Into the Shell of My Ear
• She Said, Ours Were Bodies
• Loosened Inside Me
• Tarnogród, Poland, 1939 / Houston, Texas, 2012
• To Imagine No One Completely
• Last Breeze Coming from a Jailed Girl’s Body
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author