Postcard
Radnoti’s Coat
Miklos, the weather is here and your postcards.
The ink, soaked from the slow melt of your body,
has run from black to watery blue, and I’m thinking
of your trench coat, that if bullets were rain it would
have been enough. Marching for months, starved,
beaten, pissing blood, you had it on when a guard
shot you through the neck. Handed a shovel,
the last man buried you and all the broken bodies,
some still twitching toward relief. When he finished,
guards beat him to death with shovels. Underground,
your coat’s deep pocket warmed the poems you wrote
while inside the camp. Shelley died with poems
in his pocket, too. I had a trench coat once, Miklos.
We went everywhere together. Let me go with you.
I’ll sing you that song about a Famous Blue Raincoat
and when you say “Patience flowers into death now”
in the last postcard you’d write, I’ll remember you,
James Dean cool, in that early photo. In my country,
hatred is red, white and blue. Faces radiant with fear,
they’ve set our ship ablaze and shoved off for the last
last edge. Agents are bagging men up like trophies
for the Everglades today. Today, I see your body jerk,
go limp, and I tip my hat to your coat, faithful second,
for being the last soft thing to hold your beautiful body.
Note: In 1944, as the Bor camps were evacuated, thousands were force marched from Serbia to central Hungary, poet Miklós Radnóti among them. Eventually, he was shot to death and his body dumped in a mass grave. A year and a half later, his remains were exhumed and a small notebook was found in the front pocket of his overcoat. Of the poems in the notebook the last five he would write were each titled Postcard. “Patience flowers into death now” is from the Clouded Sky translation by Steven Polgar Stephen Berg, and S. J. Marks.
~
Fuck My Feelings
“Some of those kids are,
that’s real starvation stuff.”
That says it so well, chief,
I should just hush. I’m trying
to fuck my feelings these days,
but dying kids, that’s a tough
feeling to fuck. I keep writing:
their small graves like x, small shoes
like x, searching for metaphors
to break hearts into caring
for kids reduced to the stick figures
they might have drawn once.
It should have been enough to say
they are children, enough to say
they were children, but chief,
my unfucked feelings got in the way.
word salad quote is from Trump on Gaza July 2025
~
Keith Woodruff has published poetry in RHINO, The Journal, Sundog Lit, and most recently Tupelo Quarterly. His flash and micro fiction have appeared Juked, Wigleaf, and Bending Genres. His work was selected for Best Small Fictions 2017 and 2019. He was awarded 2018 Pushcart Prize and is currently working on a chapbook.