Selected Pieces - Fiction

It’s So Quiet Here

by Hannah Rubin, New Hampshire

It’s so quiet here
our voices disperse like 
ashes on the breeze
buttercups and clover flowers 
dot the drainage ditches
ducks preen themselves 
on the concrete border of the sewage pool

here, on this flat expanse of land 
checkered with brick and wooden blocks, 
there are two types of foliage:
leaves, and 
bits of twisted wire

It’s so quiet here

no one cries out from the shells and ruins
no shots echo from the watchtowers
no more stolen suitcases, shoes, and prayer shawls.

here, no trains click and clack past the junctions
with cattle cars full of stifled cargo 
soon to be sorted into two groups and
selected.

It’s so quiet here

from the Atlantic to the Baltic 
to the southern shores of the Mediterranean.
where are their families, their homes, their villages?
where are their smiles, their songs, their prayers?


here, eighty years later, 
I mourn their imagined descendants:
all the beautiful people
the Shoah stole from me