Uchronia, or Changing the Subject

Your great-great-

not-so-great granddad

swiped Adolf Hitler’s paintbrush.

In the annals of injustice,

it’s small potatoes, yes.

I tell you tubers

are a nightshade

under the surface.

Part of family

Solanaceae.

Every eye is blind

before its birth.

You show me courtyards

rendered on canvas. The

sublimity of flowers. Hitler’s,

not your granddad’s. Splendid

if not for the brush, frayed

like the face of a macaque.

It kept him from the Academy.

Within an amended timeline,

they might have traded places.

Adolph in the Louvre,

toasted by Parisians

for his art. Granddad running for

office, no one for their lives.

I’d rather speak of primates,

you shriek about Dachau.

The way he sketched a

tower on his rapidly

thinning leg. Skeletal

by then, like snow that

wanes from branches.

No one makes a frame

for such a thing.

As to the fate of the brush,

you sigh it’s in the attic,

boxed with a baby’s toy—

rattling like a viper

when it’s lifted.

Let’s prattle instead on

snakes, the redundancy of bone;

you say there’s 11 million

skulls beneath the ground,

we’ll never know who

was who, a pair of empty grottos

where each iris should have been.

Andreas Gripp

January 15, 2026

RF Photo (macaque)