Ellen Steinbaum

like ice

I wondered who could have done those things—
taken their neighbors’ coveted apartments,
coats, silverware; tattooed the numbers so precisely;
shoved people into showers just before
the gas poured down then shoveled the remains
into loud heat
and still reached out on Sunday for the juicy slice
of roast or piece of pie, tousled their children’s hair
and laughed, snapped family photographs
around the tree
but then I saw the pictures
of newly shaved heads pale
on those boarding the planes to
where they’ve never been.

In the beginning he would tell me

there will be worse and I
thought that meant how
out into our future waited our
certain good and bad with always
the two of us no matter what. And now
all these years later weighing us
toward the ground as vigor
and skill drop away
we know each day it doesn’t get
any better than this.

Ellen Steinbaum is the author of five poetry collections and a one-person play. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and appears in several anthologies, including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places and The Widows’ Handbook. She is also an award-winning journalist and former Boston Globe columnist.