ANTON

Left, a slender golden-haired goddess—

she didn’t deign to notice me.

I let it go; since 9/11

there hasn’t been much call

for Arabs. Right,

a couple. Her: outsized, pockmarked face,

a purple velvet evening dress—it had a certain

charm. So when the boyfriend went off somewhere

we got to talking; she worked, she said,

in casting; she’d spent the afternoon

on a new Dutch miniseries,

casting local Nazis.

Ah, my Jewish fiancée and me,

you can see us growing older and fatter together,

delighting more and more in eating and

in sleeping. When the boyfriend came back

he kissed her naked shoulder while staring hard

at me. The slim blonde on my left,

as I now noticed, had a tattoo

right across the back of her neck:

Anton

it said,

in calligraphy,

between two hearts.

Anton was the first name of the leader of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (A.A. Mussert, 1894–1946)