Saigon Without War
To see war, we go to a museum.
So anti-Schopenhauer, art that doesn’t shelter.
I feel guilty over Agent Orange
though I’m not a chemist. I’m an American
and that’s just as bad. So much for all
the protesting and fasting against the war
in the 60s. If you look hard enough
to find them, two deformed fetuses float
in formaldehyde inside a display case.
Henry Kissinger had a death wish
but not for himself. The dress
code is casual. There’s no restaurant
on the premises. An average visitor spends
two hours. We spend all day and forget
to eat. Later, we realize what we really
need to do is drink. We sit at a bar
in a fancy hotel on the other side of the street
from Burger King and watch groups
of people flirt. The cocktails are jewel-toned.
Mine are blue.
There were never two sides here—
this is the brutal truth.
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Monumental Destruction
after Peter Blume’s painting, The Rock, 1944-1948
The magnate who owned Frank Lloyd Wright’s
masterpiece house said he needed
a new commissioned work—something other than
Blume’s realistic painting of Fallingwater.
But The Rock turned out too large, never to hang
on those walls, and Blume took too long to paint it,
as the War took too long, as every war
takes too long. He hoped for society’s survival,
but rendered a shattered rock, inspired by red buoys,
stained the color of the wrecked world, a massive
stone, burst and teetering. Blume’s exhausted cyclic
mess, workers clearing debris, then hammering
new wood. On one side, post-destruction,
remnants still barely visible—empty rocking
chair, oval portrait on the painting’s broken wall.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Serial Bliss / Serial Bias
Little Jew, Alma called Gustav Mahler—found
his odor repulsive. But she stayed
married to him, even
while she was having an affair
with Gropius, a true Aryan type
she thought, more racially suited.
Alma bedded and went to work
for the part-Jewish biologist
Paul Kammerer, caring for his cages
of praying mantises. Soon, she tired
of the insects and the man. Kammerer
threatened to kill himself
at Gustav’s grave if she left him. Accused
of scientific fraud—possibly sabotaged
by a Nazi at his lab—he shot himself
in a mountainous Schneeberg wood.
Harlot and cesspool her circle whispered.
Oscar Kokoschka’s mother yowled
she was a whore without garters, threatened
to shoot her. Kokoschka stalked
Alma, announced their wedding though
there was none. And then, the Alma doll
he commissioned—life-size, of swanskin
and horsehair —he paraded it
about and, in a drunken rage, beheaded
and tossed it into
his garden. They have eaten our hearts—
Alma accused
all Jews, including Kokoschka.
She married Gropius,
then Alma decided Gropius was a philistine,
that the poet Franz Werfel
was more compelling—she married
the short, ugly, fat Jew. Gropius
thought Werfel had ruined her,
called Alma degraded
by the Jewish spirit of her lovers. She agreed
with Gropius about the Jews—called
the concentration camps a fabrication,
admired the kindly, soft eyes of Hitler.
Susana H. Case has authored eight books of poetry, most recently The Damage Done Broadstone Books, 2022, which won her a third Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. Her books have previously also won an IPPY, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite award, and she was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the International Book Awards. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. She co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press, 2022. Case worked several decades as a university professor and program coordinator in New York City and currently is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. http://www.susanahcase.com/.