Oh, brother, where art thou?

By Kathleen Hellen

“You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely.”
– J.D. Salinger

I’d thought that you’d do better than a sidekick, thought that you’d articulate—knowing,
as you must, about the stink they left behind, the helicopters lifting from the ruins in Saigon.

Of course, I smelled it as a kid—a whiff—when boys who lived in trailers—their fathers pulling double-shifts, drunk on sulfur stink, spoiling for a fight, raising fists—shouted Jap—go back!
picked me up and threw me down a hill. They spit on my mother.

I smelled it when the mills laid off. Again, the odor. They murdered Vincent Chin.
Again the hint—like chlorine burning in the failed reactor:
ching chong ling long ting tong. It smelled like girls I knew in college.
A strange perfume, as if they’d lit the storefronts, piled up bodies (murders, exonerations).

And then I saw you in the clip, aiding and abetting. You turned your back on witness, like Frankl said. Only those most brutal, those who’d lost all scruples, were self-selected in the camps.
The well-fed, red-cheeked guards who ushered others to the crematoria.

I suppose that in this game of self-selection there are always those
marched off to smokestacks, and those who choose instead to pinch their noses.

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Diode Poetry Journal, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. For more on Kathleen, visit kathleenhellen.com.

Photo by Mike Marrah on Unsplash.