You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

The speaker opens the poem with these five lines, which she addresses, oddly, to a “black shoe.” Although at first the reader might wonder why the speaker is addressing a shoe, it quickly becomes clear that the shoe stands as a symbol for the oppressive conditions the speaker has experienced “for thirty years.” Just like an ill-fitting shoe can restrict the foot and hamper mobility, the speaker has felt constrained in her life, “barely daring to breathe or Achoo.” In the following stanza, the speaker shifts her address from the black shoe to her father: “Daddy, I have had to kill you” (line 6). For the rest of the poem, the speaker continues to address her father. It’s therefore only upon reading the poem for a second time that the reader comes into a fuller understanding of the opening stanza. The oppressive conditions symbolized by the black shoe relate directly to the speaker’s deceased father, whose memory continues to haunt and oppress her. In other words, the black shoe specifically references her father’s painful legacy. Just as the speaker longs to emancipate herself from this legacy, so too does she want to kick off the constricting black shoe.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

In lines 27–35, the speaker describes feelings that arose for her when, as a young girl, she heard German being spoken. It isn’t clear where this memory takes place. Was she accompanying her father in Germany? Or was she among German speakers somewhere in the United States? We have no idea. All we readers know is that the speaker had a difficult time understanding and speaking the language. From her present vantage, the speaker compares this experience of linguistic confusion to the horrific experience of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps like Dachau, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. Reflecting on her childhood feeling of oppression, she now likens the German language to “an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew.” Elsewhere in the poem, the speaker speculates about the possibility that she has Jewish ancestry. But regardless of her genealogy, the speaker was never actually a victim of the Nazi’s crimes, which makes her identification with the victims of the Holocaust—a means of conveying the intensity of her feelings that one could argue also minimizes the atrocities to which she refers—both shocking and controversial.

I was ten when they buried you.   
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.

In lines 57–67, the speaker begins by describing how, ten years after her father’s death, she attempted suicide in an effort to “get back, back, back to [him].” It seems that she made this attempt in part because she missed her father, though perhaps also because tormented by traumatic memories from her childhood. This attempt on her life didn’t succeed, and after she recovered, her relationship with her father’s memory seems to have taken a darker turn. In a complex image, she indicates that she made some kind of effigy of her father’s likeness, complete with his “Meinkampf look.” The word “Meinkampf” references the political autobiography of Adolf Hitler, titled Mein Kampf—that is, “My Struggle.” The point is that her father had a brutal, fascistic personality that suited his “love of the rack and the screw.” The effigy of her father initially seems like a voodoo doll, typically used in ritual practices to bring harm to a living person. But instead of poking pins into the doll, the speaker seems to have pursued a very different ritual: marriage. In symbolically “marrying” her father’s effigy and saying “I do,” she expresses a twisted and borderline incestuous vow to remain forever tied to his memory.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

The speaker closes the poem with these lines (76–80), in which she describes the symbolic “murder” of her father that will finally liberate her from his oppressive influence. In the previous stanza, still addressing her father, the speaker describes how she killed a “vampire who said he was you” (line 72). According to popular legend, vampires are living corpses who survive in their “undead” state by drinking the blood of the living. The word vampire may also be used in a more colloquial sense, to refer to a person who preys on or otherwise exploits other people by draining them of energy, money, or some other vital resource. The speaker’s father is a vampire in both senses of the word. Though not literally “undead,” his memory continues to haunt the speaker long after his death. In this sense, then, he is symbolically undead. He is an absent presence that continues to drain her lifeblood and inhibit her psychic well-being. It is for this reason that, here at the poem’s end, the speaker must free herself by symbolically killing her vampiric father: “There’s a stake in your fat black heart.”