Leo Rose Rodriguez

So much for leather gloves and flint

There was a man whose job it was
to log the cost of burning a sodomite to death.
So many pesos for the lumber, so many reales for rope,
so much for leather gloves and flint.
He formed the numbers carefully,
judicious with quill on vellum,
massaged cramped fingers and shifted his seat,
finally walked home. There were hundreds,
thousands of this somebody through
those three-hundred fifty-six years in Spain.
 
There was a man whose job it was
to inventory the supplies at Auschwitz.
Sheets and shoes, buttons and lightbulbs.
You could have thought Aushwitz was a shop
primarily concerned with the availability of shovels.
It was a place made of these things,
as much as syringes, as much as canisters of gas.
There were so many men who filed paperwork
for those four years in Germany.
 
There is a person whose job it is
to keep payroll records for soldiers trampling Lebanon.
 
And I do not pretend to be god’s ledger-keeper,
capable of calculating the weight and cost
of every person’s guilt. I know that
waterlogging my heart in guilt, ultimately,
is not the same thing as helping.
I know that each of us learns to,
or doesn’t, alchemize what we carry
one way or another. I’m just a person,
a sometime-woman, an always-other,
made of places that have wanted me dead and still try.
Who knows how many deaths are on my ledger.
I am burnt and burning alike–
that is, I am burnt and doing the burning.
And they have made it exceedingly difficult–
on purpose– to do otherwise. I do not want
the horror and the tyranny of the mundane
to squeeze out of me the voice which–
I hope, I hope to god, I hope– sometimes stalled
the ledger-keeper on the walk home to his children,
and made him consider kicking his books into the Manzanares River.
I want to hear the burning man inside me,
I want to hear the burner, I want to believe
he is asking me to do what he didn’t.