Aldo Amparan studies English and American Literature in the University of Texas at El Paso. His work has appeared in Rio Grande Review, Breadcrumb Scabs, and Haggardand Halloo, among other publications. More on him can be found at: http://amparan.weebly.com

Before Adolf was Hitler (June 20, 2010. Issue 18.)

Before Adolf was Hitler, Gröfaz, Herr Führer, we met
in the Garden, and he was shy and strange, with limping legs
and an impaired speech that quivered passages of Prussian Wars.

I thought
he had kind eyes.

So we drank and danced. I read him poetry from olden notebooks,
dripping trails of lavender bookmarks as he listened or
pretended better than most of the people I read to.

I thought
I had been blinded.

But that night he showed me the pubs, his bohemian life,
he showed me stuttering angles, skewed sights, and he kept
leaving lip-marks in the back of my shirt when I wasn’t watching.

I thought
he was a stranger.

And I believed in the comfort of strangers, so I followed him into
a blackened room and I sexed him there, where it turned into gas
chambers and I into a Jew, a homosexual, taken my golden teeth.

I thought
this was not real.

But now my mind is in Auschwitz, my body where Paris burns,
and my lover is blowing his eloquence out in Berlin. Again,
again, bite on cyanide goods. Care for me, my new millennium.