Interrogation in a Re-education Centre

Kinder, Küche, Kirche, you tell me again
and again. Give me a breakfast nook
and I’ll bathe it in light
like a fresh summer morn.
Give me a shoebox filled with porn
stuffed under father’s bed, I say.

I do not know your perfect way.
The nursery, kitchen, and church.
I am one who would have been pressed
for names of those with whom
the Beast consorts, depressed
like flowers in history books.

I cannot say what would have fixed
my heart, o mein inquisitor.
Kinder, Küche, Kirche, you repeat,
applying this and that. A sun breaks far
beyond this square compound.
And I’m prepared for heathen ground.