48 Hours

Published in literary journal ZINDaily.

My aunt died in a cellar under the old City Hall.
I don’t know how she’d come to be there

or what exactly they did to her: there were rumors
but by the time I was born they were almost

all dead, the ones who could have told me. She
had run a secret printing press, so perhaps

I have words in my blood, after all—a dubious
gift without her strength and fortitude,

without her faith that it all matters, every small
act, every meager contribution counts

toward something bigger than a dream: faith
that even a country can shake off evil

and reclaim life. Faith that stolen time, stolen
possibilities, stolen lives always matter.

48 hours, they said: that’s as long as you have to
hold out. 48 hours, so the others can escape.

So the others can live. (It’s a foregone conclusion
that you will die.) And she did. Her body

dumped in the night in front of the opera house
in the square where their soldiers strutted

to make a point. How many others did they take
down those stairs, into those rooms?

Radio operators, saboteurs, girls who rode bicycles
in light summer dresses, messages tucked

into their underwear. All these people, all their
lives, all their dreams. All their blood.

I live in the shadow of a woman I never knew,
a woman not allowed to live past twenty.

A woman who knew the only number that mattered
was 48.