Joshua Cohen - Witz

Metro Gestapo arriving only now, they slimily insinuate themselves, as if only to prove their mandate, attempting to stun, restrain — impossibly, which is possibly only for the cameras closing in, how they’re uniformly heroes, expecting the martyrdom of sudden fame, or promotion to a desk. Survived only to be taken from the Joysey wood, never lost their instincts, these dogs are here treeing what domestication’s being called for: the microphone menschs, the skied and skated lights and sound — dogs freakishly howling at the rising sun, snouting out its shine from behind the smokecast weather. They begin with their ripping and tearing, and then — even the hulkingest two or three encircled in the square, these specimens almost monstrous, worked muscular and venegeful, they’re swallowing up the evermore arriving medics, doctors, nurses, and miscellaneous disaster professionals, volunteer spectators by the hundreds if not thousands and more having sleighed or skied, skated and snowshod in from Joysey, smoked out of the city, melting into a stream sourced from all its fivealarmed boroughs: these dogs, they’re gulping them up, gnashing the gawkers then swallowing down…the terrible gape of their jaws, their mawgasps, a grum whinny, such pain in their haunches — aflame; Gestapo and those immediately, provisionally, deputized don’t let it go to your head, they’re trying their damnedest to subdue with smallarms fire, which only slows, though, and angers more, these mutants trudging on, doggeda-head and always toward the ice, Manhattan’s skyline fray. A coldbottomed, darkmorning hell of monkeys frantically freed and jumping up and down atop canine backs, dogs and bitches, too, with pups hanging from their teats, distended, burning they’re squealing at suck, biting on for their lives, chewing blood into milk, swinging, six on each at least and gnawing one another, as if leashed, by their teeth, they’re pendulous in the air, and tenuous there — and then, a gullscattering smatter of heavier weaponry, a cannon, must be, gross bombinations who can tell from whence they come whether over the ice from the Battery or from Joyseyways, and with their paws placed forward a first step from the rim of Manhattan’s ice, the dogs totter, lean, and slowly, one by one, fall, raising steam, a surface splash, crushing their pups to drown them, they fall dead the monkeys, too, what with their weight and fall how they fall through the ice now, to the water below, to begin their slow hairy sinks; firemenschs gathering throughout the paddly, madly shrieking descent of that afternoon and later even, quieting, as the dogs’ bodies fix, and the monkeys’ fix, too, then freeze; only to become melted, though, amid the roasting of marshmallows, certifiably kosher, speared on sticks of Israelien furniture — armchairs, desklegs, bedlegs — in the dusking dying flames set upon their flesh.

And then, as if feathers from wings, as stars ejected from the flight of the sky — snow begins to fall.

A hull, a husk, what a waste…what’s left’s only the exposing of foundation to the scandal of undestroying light: the Israelien basement lying open, exhumed innardly for autopsy, domestic viscera, how there’s nothing left to heal or save, to balm or else, to change — partially unfinished forever, an embarrassment of riches, and a rich embarrassment, too: the char of boxes, latter survivors of those once kept in perpetual flux, stepward retained and remained by the sacred calendar always, immovable trunks stilled at the stairhead, the leftovers of the melted refrigerator, storaged waste the wilted LPs, textbooks and cookbooks and the books underlined only in ash, a disagreeing highlight, flaming white rounds of balls for pingpong use on a roll around the tabled remains without a net. The yard, which is the furthest preserve, or once was, of His house, the only parcel left somewhat unscathed, otherly harmed, give or take, we’re talking. And how He’d never noticed that, never will either — that not only had they uprooted and moved His house for Him, and its frontlawn, too, the whole lot of plot with anything goes strewn and the fence too low to keep in appearances with a gate without a lock…but how they’d gone and taken the backyard, too, there facing the windows He’d never looked out of, will never look down from — they’re shattered, sills a crack of cinder — and so the backyard surviving and with it, its twin appletrees, grown so near the ice they’d been forgotten about, withered, and witheringly forlorn, taken as icicles when regarded, if, by whom — as shadows, mere excreta of winter, wisps of remaining smoke, two mirrors placed to face one another, reflectively infinite with frost: Rubina had climbed them once hard between her legs, Simone and Judith had one summer every day of it come here to pick and cool; though all of their apples had long soured, then fallen far moons ago, only to be pilfered by Brooklyn boychicks out for a sin motzei Shabbos — now nearly a year dead, these two trees seasonscorched, still standing.

As for the Temple dimmed in the distance, its star a sixth risen above the smoke, it’s been foreclosed upon by the State in a reckless invocation of, pay attention, eminent domain: it’s theological, you wouldn’t understand, better let the rabbis handle that, your former friends and neighbors; then its site haphazardly converted, seemingly overnight, all extant of its one hundred and eight floors, and with its ritzy penthouse, too, the highest gallery of the holy once intended as the Manhattan residence of the High Priest, which is Him’s what they’d been thinking when He’s old enough, if ever — to laudably lowincome, Section Shmoneh (8) governmentsubsidized housing (who’d use it as a shul, as it’d been suggested early in the planning process, who would pray on grounds so presumptive, so irremediably, irredeemably tainted, was the dissenting thought), essentially tenementspace set aside under new legislation specifically for the use of young, recently hitched couples (parking included, one cart per family, plus unlimited use of a post for the hitching of horses), husbands studying days at whichever yeshiva they might’ve qualified for, and that statesponsored, also, most of the more respected institutions situated Uptown at Park’s edge toward Harlem with a host of others scattered north throughout the Heights; their womenfolk taking in what laundry and sewing they can, cooking for their husbands home argumentweary, come sundown to this, the penultimate floor, hosting apartments #s 102–108, at present home to the Marys reinvented Malkas: three Malkas, or perhaps they prefer Malcha, who knows how they pronounce it, Kotsk, recently married off to triplets named Ivan, greencarded in from Russia, blackhatted out in Brooklyn before, exhaustedly, being relocated here, and two Malkas Plotsk, too, incredibly unrelated to one another though the younger’s a distant enough relation, it’s been said (by them), to the elder Kotsk if you know him, then a Malcha Upstairchik and her neighbor Malcha Downstairchik, though the both of them with their husbands they lived on the same floor and right nextdoor, lighting the Hanukah candles tonight in their windows with views to the Park not quite to die for but appreciable enough, they’ll live; they’re in their kitchens deepfrying latkes, flipping, then flipping again as if the very flatness of their lives, one side to the other, a conversion if slightly burning in the head, and stirring how they’re always stirring away at these thick, gooseskinned burbles of soups and cholents that they have to remind themselves every now and again not to add butter to because schmaltz, gribnes, flanken it’s fleischig, don’t forget — these new words stirring their mouths to a spit from the turn of the secular year, the false turn to which they’ve already turned their backs and with a poo poo over the shoulder poo to the past how they’re stirring dreidel round and round from nothing’s Nun to Gimel takes all in (their stomachs as wide as their households’ deepest pot, a donation), even through the Eve itself never once stilling themselves from their preparations in order to reflect, even for a moment, a moment with its own pregnancy, too, in the glow of the gathered lights, altogether eightdue.