Stephen Gibson
At the Nuremberg Museum
American GIs would have learned from movies and posters during basic training that each poison gas had a different smell—in the museum video, Göring won’t look at camp survivors. Each gas was compared to something familiar, so any city kid or farm boy could tell—GIs would have learned about poison gasses in basic training from movies and posters. Camp inmates who worked on Auschwitz’s platform knew about the showers, but had to keep silent with each train arrival—Göring won’t look at those inmate sonderkommando survivors. Some gasses were infamous, from World War I; others didn’t make the war, being late bloomers—GIs would have learned that in basic training from movies and posters. After Charlottesville and its “Confederate-heritage” white-supremacist marchers, the Southern Poverty Law Center in the U.S. updated its 900+ hate groups—if Göring were alive, he’d flash that famous grin greeting such supporters. GIs learned in basic training from movies and posters
phosgene was like hay;
chloropicrin, flypaper;
mustard gas, garlic—
in the Nuremberg video, Göring won’t look at survivors.
Stephen Gibson is the author of Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) winner of the Miller Williams Prize. His previous collections include The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press, 2016); Rorschach Art Too (Story Line Press, 2014), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize sponsored by the Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards of the West Chester University Poetry Center; Paradise (University of Arkansas Press, 2011), a finalist for the Miller Williams prize; Frescoes (Lost Horse Press, 2011); Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House, 2008), selected and introduced by Andrew Hudgins; and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press, 2001). His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including (but not limited to) Agni, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review The Paris Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review. He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.
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