The Kretschmar Child
Gerhardt
Crazy Marie
Child K, sex unknown,
I never learned to speak
I never learned to show
whether I could speak
(to learn to speak
but someone knows my name
(I don’t
want to protect
my parents
wanted me
to die
I had one arm. I had one leg.
Solomon divided me. Someone
saw idiocy
in the shape of my skull,
in the sounds I didn’t make,
in my blindness—I don’t know—some doctor said
my mom and dad
wrote to Hitler for permission
to exterminate
my remaining limbs; I won’t
say me.
Someone knows my name.
Some doctor
isn’t saying. My name
is Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar.
My father Richard Gerhard, my mother
Lina Sonja, and I
was born in 1939, and I
was T4’s birth
or at least excused it
with my parents’ wishes
I could never run
a company or a machine
I never saw a machine
without pressing my palms
against my wrinkled ears; I never saw
a company—what
does a company look like but I could
run and run and run
and I would
run and run and run
and I knew
it frightened my mother and father
and I
ran and ran and ran
until I was strapped
into the bus then onto the bed
sometimes there was a needle instead
I still run and run and run
and no one hears
A letter from Grafeneck said
I had encephalitis
my mind, never strong
could not stand with life
when some virus swelled my brain
in the same summer I was moved there
but I danced in the grey bus of 1940, in the grey
light of full noon ash in a cloudy sky
when I couldn’t rise
from my seat, from my bed
not because I couldn’t stand
but because it broke the rules,
I danced inside—tensed one muscle
then the other—and I danced
in that jammed room, waiting for the shower
I’d like to say I danced
even when I couldn’t breathe
but I lost control before I died, maybe ten
minutes before the machine
lifted our twisted bodies into the flames
but my body kept dancing in the heat
popping and leaping
as bones dried and flesh went black and grey
and I dance now
that I can’t move
having nothing left to move
I dance
in the wind that clears the smoke away
Elizabeth Kate Switaj is a Liberal Arts Instructor at the College of the Marshall Islands and a Contributing Editor to Poets’ Quarterly. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Queen’s University Belfast and an M.F.A. in Poetics and Creative Writing from New College of California. Her first collection of poetry, Magdalene & the Mermaids, was published in 2009 by Paper Kite Press. Recent poems have appeared in Compose and Sundog Lit. For more information visit www.elizabethkateswitaj.net
