by Shoshauna Shy

no interest in standing on European soil,
on English moors, in castles, in the lick
of the Seine.  None of it calls me, and I doubt
it ever will despite friends’ arias on airmail paper,
a torrent of adjectives colliding with verbs
about hanging straw hats over Italian
balconies, dancing across bridges
with Irish beaux

while I sleep contentedly
in mid-placed Wisconsin
under the prairie piece of a younger quilt
as if I’d had my fill of cobblestone and blue wool,
as if I’d been at Dachau
in a former life.
Maybe Treblinka is the reason I’m not taking
transatlantic flights

for the gritty ash captured between steel plates
keeps grinding, blood that pours and pools
still haunts my heart.

Once or twice in winter, I’ve considered Sweden
to ski the forest trails, to skate the frosted dark
because it most resembles exactly where
I’m living, but then I had to ask myself
what would be the point

Shoshauna Shy’s poems have been published on Poetry Daily, in Poetry 180, The Seattle Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest  and elsewhere.  She has a publishing company called Woodrow Hall Editions which is responsible for the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf and the Woodrow Hall Jumpstart Award programs.  Her most recent collection won an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association.