Incurable Chatterbox

a poem about Anne Frank

INCURABLE CHATTERBOX

“Years seem to have passed between Sunday and now.”

- July 8, 1942

My oeuvre of sixteen thousand tweets
now reads like Anne’s diary before hiding:

my weak marks in algebra, my crush calling
on the phone, the last of the fancy biscuits,

fascism as backdrop for my juvenilia.
Before the state of emergency,

we thought we could virtue signal
our way to the top of the list

Who’s Spared. While you squabble
over who’s paying their housekeeper

most generously, a call-up notice comes
for Anne’s father and she pictures “lonely cells”

in concentration camps—she has no idea
what to actually fear. We do.

I’m in hiding with a man whose grandmother
saw Hitler on a trolley, fled to England,

survived the Blitz, outlived Anne by decades.
I’m papering my walls with Hollywood postcards,

not giving up on imagination or glamour
while I wait for my period to come

so I can finally stop crying. How long
until I’m forced to cut my beloved’s hair?

When he begs to journey to CVS
for superior scissors, I try to scare him

with what I heard on our contraband radio:
a doctor tried to bring a thirty-eight-year-old,

who looked like her fiancé, back to life. She failed.
I confess my childhood fantasy was to live

like Anne: ration diet of endive, romance
with the sky, built-in end times boyfriend.

She spent 761 days inside the house behind.
She would have loved how much we love her.