MICHAEL WATERS Ashkenazi Birthmark

Maybe the parapsychologists are right

To claim that birthmarks

Intimate wounds sustained in prior lives,

An idea darker & more complex than believing

The heart-shaped stain on your daughter’s back

Resulted from a mother’s love of strawberries.

This perfectly round benign brown button

Sewn onto my forehead in the womb

Must speak of a maternal great-uncle

Executed in Vinnytsia, 1942,

The bullet hole from which a plume of smoke

Escaped like a soul, if one believes in souls…

That whole side of the family gone now,

No one to ask about the ancestor

Named Alexei or Grigory or Ze’ev

Whose corpse bore a bullet hole on his brow,

This birthmark through which the unhoused wisp

Spirals into cursive to strike this page.

from The Gettysburg Review