By Jessi Quinn Alperin

My Jewish my jewishness my Jewish jewishness;

White day / tree Pittsburgh.

My Jewish want.

Jewish student–Jewish community

Students felt want.

Maybe one

Jewish Shabbat;

Anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish, anti.

Jewish students, crisis, two hours.

H O W ?

It’s Pittsburgh;

It’s my city.

Just don’t;

Because Squirrel Hill can’t fucking pretend.

If this poem feels hollow, feels empty to you, I completely understand. We, in Pittsburgh, have been left to hardly cope with visors around our eyes. We can’t be here for the shooting in Tallahassee, no one has been here for us; it’s not vindication, it’s all loss and full loss. We’ve got no guide dog and no fences. Lost, confused, fully alone, and too afraid to look into each other’s eyes, so we’re filling our hollow stomachs with cotton balls. Pittsburgh is not just its students; I believe our students have been selfish, Jewish and goyishe alike. Squirrel Hill can’t fucking pretend, and we have done a lot, and we are still continuing to do things. The most definite problem is that it will never be enough because grief ends at the cliff. We can keep rewinding the tape and watching it over and over in a sick rotation. We cannot heal or fortify our poems or armor again, ready to fight, until we face our: loneliness, this hatred, the cruel indifference of this world, a kind and good refusal for anything less than a fight, and most of all, his terrorism. What I leave you:

Eyes over Pittsburgh’s loss,

Can’t not fight,

this problem feels hollow.