by Susan Cossette
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| Swastika graffiti at Naturally Good Foods in Montauk, Photo: Rabbi Josh Franklin. —Dan’s Papers, October 30, 2023 |
We spend the morning cleaning graffiti.
An antisemitic phrase
scrawled on a Holocaust survivor’s home in California.
A display supporting Israeli hostages,
kicked over in Minnesota.
Palestinian nationalist messaging
spray-painted on a non-profit’s building in Rhode Island.
There is no justification
for raping and murdering
ordinary citizens in front of their families,
mutilating babies,
decapitating people,
using automatic weapons and grenades
to hunt down and murder young people
at a music festival celebrating peace,
burning families alive,
kidnapping and taking hostages,
parading women hostages in front of chanting crowds,
and documenting it all on social media.
Kristallnacht 2023.
Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.