A Theory of Snow Globes
In a snow globe, rubble falls from the sky. No need to turn over this city. The war office takes care of it, assisted by the war cabinet, the department of defense, the Reich Ministry of War, the ministry of defense and of national defense, federal department of defense, civil protection, and sport, department of defense support, the Defense Force, and the armed forces, across the hall from the bureau of taxation and the bureau of land management.
See the submarine-shaped knob on the outside of the snow globe? the tank?
The knob turns on its own, and under the direction of that airplane, a music of silence starts [“Night Music for a Snowstorm”] which sounds like Schubert’s Winterreise or Max Richter’s “November” or Freya Arde’s The Corridors of Power or Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Or a Wehrmacht soldier slipping into a village church to play Bach on the organ. In a vintage snow globe, rubble falls in a white font for 22 minutes (Pforzheim, February 23, 1945) or two days (Dresden, February 13-15, 1945) or in Hamburg, Essen, or Wielún, Warsaw, Coventry, London.
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No one took the air raids seriously; they were so frequent. Get in the shelter, get off your bike, your aunt stopped to roll a cigarette??, until they did. (Enter the) (breathing building) Stop praying. It uses up the oxygen.
Stefan Stelz Snow Globe
Little pictures of my father fell like snow. Little pictures of her father fell like snow, three times as many of him. Word snow during a snow squall, wordfall inside a snow globe, black and white father in uniform with insignia scratched out, fathers missing everywhere, wallet-sized men. Handsome eyebrow arched like a bridge crossed by a foot soldier in Russia in winter, first to a village of absence, then to the village of elsewhere. Little pictures fell in a wordfall inside a snow globe. Artic banks of bedding on the street led to the all-white room of a dead end.
It is already 6 PM. Everything will happen at 7:50 PM. Everything will have happened by 8:12 PM. By 9:21 PM. On the sidewalks, brass plates with the names of Jewish ermordet victims gleam. A yellowed price sticker is still on the bottom of the snow globe. It’s in Deutsche Mark, not Euro. I must have picked up this snow globe when I was in West Germany in 1989.
I can crank this tiny knob, and a certain music will play. The cranking sounds like walking toward a grave. I am afraid of what the snow globe might say. Its lyrics could be entries in a Soldbuch, activities on the Eastern Front. The song might be the length it took for a historic city to be destroyed (twenty-two minutes) one February evening.
Who collects the snow globes of war and of fathers?
A collection of snow globes, each says “it is snowing.”
Greyhound
ON THE SENTENCE AS LONG AS A ROAD a mechanical whirring.
A mother-shaped gap at the end of a long stick. Other cut-outs
include a “D” and a “G.” She rushes ahead to catch your attention.
The city ruins fold, unfold, like paper peaks in a child’s fortune teller;
a drawing of a girl waits on a wall with a roller skate, the left foot.
So many air raid shelters in how she’s always listened to you.
Just once, you won’t chase after her. No matter the caved-in apartment building
she disappears into. You will not yell, “Achtung!” “Don’t step inside!”
To trick you, Time and Love screws on other models:
your mother as widow, white-haired and circling the block, mumbling
the morning after; as young wife, three children and husband on a yellow sofa;
your freckled thin mother posed with dolls that belong to her school.
The phosphorous comma might wait in the dark
with the blank planks for sitting, shelves for canned food.
Horrific sound of the city destroyed in twenty-two minutes.
Meanwhile, murals from the first world war on the façade pulse
in the June light.
Argument Towers
In Lucca, Italy,
repeatedly crossed out
back-and-forth
argument towers
Afraid of heights
I refused to pay the fee
to climb rickety
stacks of chiasmi,
packed dirt, dangling
weeds—not my faith,
—and waited on
the cobbled street
outside a small church
(the shops at siesta)
for my husband and
daughters to descend
Kein Problem, e no problemo
that I didn’t ascend
But seven years later
from my ripped office chair
a leafy holm oak tree waves
on top the Torre Guinigi,
built in the 1300s:
The walled-in city
once had 250 argument towers.
In 1805 Napoleon
“gifted” Lucca to his sister Elisa, as thirteen miles away
via Air Mail, Luftpost
called Menscharglichnicht
people, don’t argue:
the bone tower in Pisa
Sank into the Field of Miracles.
To reach the kitchen,
servants climbed 232 steps
while in a rain of cutlery, bed pans,
sauce pots, goblets, plates,
re: Boccaccio’s pot of basil
re: Catherine de Medici’s
planter of oregano,
the big-name family
dropped their household
on rivals, occasionally, I read,
killing someone.
In the 1980s, my German relatives
from Pforzheim—a firebombed
historic city, 17,600 residents killed
on February 23, 1945,
between 7:50 and 8:12 PM
by the Royal Air Force, 31.4%
Of the population, 83%
of the buildings made
into a setting of ruins
SEVEN YEARS AFTER KRISTALLNACHT,
THE NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS,
HURLED STARS
INTO SIDEWALKS
by my husband’s relatives
In Coventry, England—
sent us a board game
a game which we call
“Aggravation”
in English.
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Alexandria Peary served as New Hampshire Poet Laureate (2019-2024) and is the author of nine books, most recently, Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak. Her work has received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and the Iowa Poetry Prize and has appeared in New American Writing, North American Review, Lana Turner, the New York Times, Barrow Street, Southern Humanities Review, the Yale Review, and Rooted 2: Best New Arboreal Nonfiction. She specializes in mindful writing, the topic of her TEDx Talk, “How Mindfulness Can Transform the Way You Write.” She is a 2024-2025 recipient of a Fulbright to write and research two books in Germany.
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Bill Wolak has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared as cover art for such magazines as Phoebe, Barfly Poetry Magazine, Ragazine, Cardinal Sins, Pithead Chapel, The Wire’s Dream, and Phantom Kangaroo. His collages and photographs have appeared recently in the 2020 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, the 2020 Dirty Show in Detroit, the 2020 Rochester Erotic Arts Festival, the 2018 Montreal Erotic Art Festival, and Naked in New Hope 2018.
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