First published in Prairie Schooner, Volume 98, Number 2, Summer 2024.

I.

I hadn’t intended to write
about massacres
this early in the morning but I am

on Anishinaabe Land,
the art exhibit reminds me. The tallest wall
of the museum dressed black as a widow 

and history—in bold letters—demands witness: 

October 15, 1900, the county sheriff forced
residents from their homes
and they were burned to the ground. 

I hadn’t intended to write
about massacres but they were burned
to the ground and I am searching 

for what may speak of them  
to me. In fine print, a framed poem
whispers on the wall:              

                                  This is not my grief
                                  but a small hole, lightless. 

II.

A small hole, dilating, fire 

that one Ramadan night in Tirat Haifa,
July 25, 1948, swallowed acres
of wheat and seventy elderly, gathered

for a meeting then too slow
to escape it. Ask my grandmother who
heard it from her grandmother. I was not there

but there is no forgetting what was—  

barrels of gasoline over golden locks
and what I write from a memory
not entirely mine, alone.

III.

On Anishinaabe Land, conditioned air
and what I cannot bear looking
away from. 

Let us dare to shed light, then, says the wall. 

My grandmother withholding the names
of the burned and the words of a Jewish woman
who once wept with me ablaze in my ear— 

“When we landed there, we didn’t know what
we didn’t know—”

Let us dare to shed light, then. Let light color us
visible. Dark.