By Sarah Koros

Blood spills like oil

Pooling it glimmers slick 

Its metallic stench making a home in my nostrils, my poors, my temples

My aching crowns and backs.

I’m pollen: casualties in growth itching the throat.

While your bullets pierce flowers like us til we go

away in memory, name, words. . . 

But I will never forget. As for you

I’m not so sure yet.

Your silence is deafening.

That’s why I’m not fucking surprised.

I remember gunmen threats at Jewish day school. Relentless anti-Semitic graffiti. The constant Holocaust jokes. The denier, comparer, relayer. Generous uses of Nazi and Hitler as adjectives. But the names of those lost remain without narrative.

Hearts broken. That’s all there is.