Nightmare Poem

Abstract

Nightmare Poem Joy Arbor (bio) I am startled awake, Grandpa, by your sudden barking in perfect Berliner German, and I am one of your soldiers fresh from the camps standing in formation, your accent turning blood to ice. You resume in Hebrew as we train in the baking sun for a country we can call our own, only the unspeakable holding me up. And then I am you, Grandpa, looking at your men, bone-thin and shadowed with untold sufferings, folded, bleeding into antimatter. What life was in the camps. And then we are both soldiers on a tank, deployed, in an Arab village, fighting a long battle. And after the other army withdraws, I burst through the door of a house, fire in my veins, lightning flash screaming starts and stops. Some villagers hiding give themselves up, we pull out the men, tie their hands together, and shoot them, dumping their bodies in a basin by the village spring. What are we thinking? In a few days the water will taste rotten. But right now I know the four girls ordered to carry water for soldiers are in those empty houses. I wait outside one while it's happening. I don't know where you've gone. And now my son, not even crawling the last you saw him, is grown and firing a gun at a woman with a baby and she's me and in the space between fire and impact, I wake up and my son is still a boy racing cars on the carpet and you are still dead and still all this has never ended. [End Page 190] Joy Arbor A human rights advocate and the granddaughter of a captain in Israel's War for Independence, Joy Arbor joined the Compassionate Listening Project's citizen delegation to Israel and the West Bank in order to listen to people from a variety of perspectives. Poems about her experiences have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Lunch Ticket, and Scoundrel Time, among others. She is also the author of the chapbook, Where Are You From, Originally? (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and the winner of an Academy of American Poet's Prize. She lives with her husband and son in the Thumb of Michigan and blogs occasionally about genocide and racism at https://joyarbor.net/blog/. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press