At the further curve of their furthest circumambulation, way past the perimeter fence, into the spill of latterdays’ death — last nights ordered a rush, a mad frothing into morning’s calm bed, strawstrewn with dawn’s reddish strandlings, its braided rivers of blood…how they’d been directed to martyr quickfast, doubletime before that doubling month of Adar returned, and with it its moon ordaining that newest of holidays, the festival of Purim rededicated, with the Sanhedrin proclaiming it V-Day — the impassioned observance of our most recent miracle lately usurping an olden salvation, the random succor of lots (who gets to scavenge, who goes without); then beyond…Zaol I–VII, each encampment circumscribing the victory in an inset of rings, as if targets rippling out from camp to camps over fields that are field, plod after plot of this soaked, soaking earth, anything but plain — matted a rasp in barbarous curls, ringlets, snips, spikes, licks, and locks; a harvest wildly wilted this devastatingly untonsured spanse of wildform growth, this if not yet thinning, blondbrowning ground. A scatter of jaundice, scalps expressionlessly blank as picked clean of features…and then atop this all, red heifers, which are less prized nowadays considering they’ve been bred by the hundreds of heads, leaning to fat from their previous starve, they’ve been engineered to graze hereupon, to grave, teething up the crown of the crop: this yellowed to blond, this dark ginger darkening in its tear to dreck’s brown, exposed, with highlights of light henna, last dye grown out, still growing out even in death, lightest red streaked skylike with peroxide. Hair, coming up from the fields, as if grown by the very bald of the earth: there are heads buried down there, they’re up to their necks in it, mouthed nosedeep, at the eyes and then deeper toward the brittle crown, the pastured scalp; not screaming or shouting for help, not even blinking eyes or crinkling ears with wrinkly foreheads, no pain, and not much face left to time or interpret with: worms make their wriggly hurtles from nostril to nostril, socket to whistle of air between what teeth remain. Bodies planted, many suspect they’ve been purposefully planted: be patient, your certificate must be still in the mail…as a reminder to whatever fight might remnant a muster, a Resistance, Underground the underground, a.ny a.cronym that might never have had any name, whether boulder or bold, under which to wig or disguise (it was all, it’s been said, this sick Kapo’s idea, the work of the Austiner Rebbe, unofficially held to be one of the most vicious schmucks ordaining around).
