i walked into the courtyard
of your childhood in the leopoldstadt district
of vienna & called mommy but nothing
came out & the turkish children
looked up from their play & this
is how it looks in this year’s ghetto.
i didn’t wonder for too long
why guards with semiautomatic weapons
stand outside the turkish embassy
in this town with barely a memory
of its dead jews. recent archeological
studies in the center of the city
reveal medieval evidence of jews
some sort of monument, the signs
say, will show how these settlers lived before
they were burned, with the remainder shipped
down the danube, half dead, for leaking
their ritual bathwater into the water supply
& spreading plague. the turkish children of vienna
continue to stare.