Rikki Santer

Collector

            “Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of language.
Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone.”

                                   — George Steiner, Language & Silence

These days in apocalyptic video games we can choose to be the virus, like what
lives inside his tower of boxes in this collector’s comfortable suburban home.
He’s been buying and trading for two decades, but before he’ll be shipping off
his entire historical repository to a Polish museum, he sits me down at his dining
room table.  Plastic sleeves, then more and more of brittle Nazi text where
the permeable membrane of fear breathes on. Figurines and ashtrays. Postcards
and flyers. Twisted power of art. Talmudic passages perverted and betrayed.
So many hooked noses suspended in propaganda urgency atop teetering globes,
spearing Aryans, embracing heaps of shekels. A smirking Mickey Mouse reshaped
into dastardly Jude. Cunning hands big as hams. Shadowed contagion. Race debased. 
Rabbi lynched as sculpture. Slithering reptiles and parasitic spiders with Hasidic heads.
On Reichsbank currency, stickers and banners Do not buy from Jews!  Movie-style
posters embodied by fat-lipped, gluttonous demons:  The Eternal Jew responsible
for corruption of all humanity.
        Acknowledge this Jewish collector
alongside his cabinet
of curiosities packed
with chaos and abyss.

Witness his passion
                        as he tries to hold
                                                          a slippery history
                                    by its spiked and bloody tail.

Rikki Santer poems have appeared in various publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Heavy Feather Review, Slab, Slipstream, [PANK], Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Hotel Amerika and The Main Street Rag. My work has received many honors including 2023 Ohio Poet of the Year, Pushcart, Ohioana and Ohio Poet book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. My thirteenth poetry collection, Zebra Lashes, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.