Saturday book feature — Transmissions from Bone House — Stephen Bunch

from “Second Life”

In First Life, Dr. Aribert Heim
collected Jüdische Schädel,
especially treasured the children’s skulls
in a line on a shelf
in his Matthausen office.
Somewhere they went missing,
as did he from the photograph
of his German champion hockey team,
ten years post-war.

The Khazars, he claimed, drove him
to the tennis court roof of the rundown hotel
in downtown Cairo. They forced him to hear
the muzzein’s call from Al Azhar mosque,
to which he walked fifteen miles each day,
“Tarek Hussein Farid,” with the check
from his sister in Baden-Baden
and his German Koran, gift
for “Uncle Tarek”
from his landlord’s children.

Seldom seen in Cairo’s streets and stalls
without his camera, he never appeared
in a photograph. His unpublished
book on the Zionists disappeared
in Second Life, as did his cancer-
ridden Aryan body.

by Stephen Bunch, from Transmissions from Bone House (Woodley Press, 2016)

buy link: http://woodleypress.org/books#/transmissions-from-bone-house