Two Poems By A. Whittenberg

Day Job

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After a night of therapeutic bottle and blunt passing

He wakes on earth at 5AM

In a lumpy bed

He goes to the airport in his overalls

Brandishing a handkerchief

He scrubs the thick plastic windows

With long handles bruises

He watches the jets take off

They move hot through the endless sky

With purpose

Dora circa the War Years

For remembrance, the picture of her girlish dark-haired freshness and

a taut, three-paragraph bio was posted on a flagpole

For a week, students passed her, too wrapped in their own bad days and

stressors, their own crosses to bear, to notice

Hiding, maneuvering,

Creating a bottomless sense of chaos

Dora had spent her wonder years as a partisan

Making, makeshift weapons out of lost parts

Sleeping in forests

Using her trusty machine gun as a pillow

Evading, plotting,

breathing almost to the date of liberation

She had escaped the ghettos,

the trains rides, the liquidations

Until, too many Germans surrounded,

demanding they produce a Jew

Disarmed, momentary solidarity melted to basic instinct

Someone pointed out Dora

They bound her hands

Tied a rock to her neck

Threw her in the river

Then shot her twice

An empty, gray ending to a would-have-been

full, green life

Under other circumstances…

A Whittenberg is a Philadelphia native who has a global perspective. If she wasn’t an author she’d be a private detective or a jazz singer. She loves reading about history and true crime. Her other novels include

Sweet Thang, Hollywood and Maine, Life is Fine, Tutored and The Sane Asylum.