mobile crematoriums and graves
mass on soil already made of bone
history repeats unbroken record
great-grandmother served Russian soldiers
in Kyiv’s kitchens after the war
in America she’d scream
about a Nazi’s hands I won’t let you take me
she said he’d brought his wife
to watchunnamed untraceable
as how or where they shot or burned
or buried my great-grandfather
genocide unnamed too until 6 million gone
how many more can we bear now
gen– “give birth” before we name it
–cide “a killing” before we lose track
counting plagues and bodies
history repeats unbroken record
my son asks why are they still hurting
Ukraine? and I search for a word beyondÂ
repetition or prayer—may deathÂ
pass over our house
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Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine, as a Jewish refugee in 1993, when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019), finalist for the Jewish Book Award; Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2023. Her poems appear in POETRY, Blackbird, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry, pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. She is the founder and host of Words Together, Worlds Apart, a virtual poetry reading series born out of pandemic but meant to outlast it. She is currently Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with her two kids, cat, dog, and husband.
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