Saturday, November 04, 2023

SWASTIKAS ON MONTAUK AND EVERYWHERE ELSE

by Susan Cossette


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 MothThe New Verse News, ONE ARTAs it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin ChicThe 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.