Today’s New Verse News: THIS WAS NOT A NEWS STORY
by Catherine Gonick
Cold Spring, NY, October 15, 2022
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The trees were at their red and orange height as we drove toward our town and had to stop for a parade. A police car parked sideways on the road blocked our way. At first we thought the line of cars was a funeral procession, until we noticed the drivers and passengers were all boys, some standing to wave American flags from top-down convertibles, open moon-roofs, the backs of 4 x 4s. They smiled as they passed, and a few saluted like Nazis. The next week, the editor of the local paper said it sounded like the high school parade held the previous Friday. But we’d seen this procession the next day. The police said they knew nothing about it. As far as we knew, only my husband and I had seen it. I saw just one Hitler salute, but he saw three. Afterward we kept driving to a birthday party for a friend, a Holocaust survivor still going strong at 95. He told the guests about the night the doorbell rang and his father was taken to Dachau. We reported the parade we’d just seen, which already felt like a dream.
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Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Forge, Live Encounters, Soul-Lit, and Amethyst Review, and in anthologies including Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and, forthcoming, Rumors, Secrets, Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She lives in Cold Spring, NY and works in a company that slows the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.