Robert Klein Engler

Robert lives and writes in Chicago. He can be reached at alphaBpres@aol.com.

His poems and stories have appeared in Borderlands, Hyphen, Christopher

Street, The James White Review, American Letters and Commentary, Kansas

Quarterly, and many other magazines and journals. He was the recipient of

the Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for his poem Flower Festival at

Genzano, which appeared in Whetstone and Three Poems for Kabbalah, which

appeared in Fish Stories, II.

"What Is This Crap about Lamenting the Destruction of Tenochtitlan?"

Baby's blood was used to wash the altar,

and dried to scabs in the priest's hair.

Human hearts flopped like rubber meat

down the stone stairs, then they peeled off

a man's skin, dressed in it, and danced.

The tom-tom echoed his heartbeats.

Flutes sounded the whistle of an arm bone.

Every NO was muffled by obsidian.

Rabbi Akiba, a man after my own heart,

said that "suffering is precious."

When the iron teeth of the Romans raked

his flesh, he thought of meat hooks

in the market ... this is what a man's body is.

Barbed wire is not made from silk.

There is only one God.

The Aztecs are Nazis, too.

Robert Klein Engler