We threw out his WWII manuals on the M4 Sherman, the “Tommycooker.” Piles of clothes and shoes carted off to Goodwill. Flotsam of a lifetime, from legal documents to Nazi plunder to oxygen masks, still fighting his own private war. The holocaust filled each room, that lingering smell of pipe-smoke.

Jim Doss lives in Sykesville, Maryland, and earns his living as a software engineer. He has previously published two books of poems: Learning to Talk Again and What Remains. In partnership with Werner Schmitt, he also published a book of German translations entitled The Last Gold of Expired Stars: The Complete Poems of Georg Trakl 1908 – 1914. In his spare time, he is an editor for the Loch Raven Review.