Unmade Worlds

The winds were brittle and thin
in —Lia, —Ria, —Ine, —Iti.
Countless small, starved shadows entered the promised gates of Arbeit macht frei
now clung to memories’ bones
 
They were no older than nine when the world turned to ash
as hands of mothers in —Ria shovelled fifty-eight-point-six-inch graves
under smoke-kissed skies.
 
Prayers spiralled from broken chimneys, 
for the lives too brief to make the heavens care. 
Radios flashed hundred different types of despairs in —Ine; 
some were named by its taste:
Sawdust bread laden with the salt of silent tears. 
 
Steel eyes pierced into every household, 
flashing their drug-laced lanyards
inflicting wounds on bullet-sized hearts.
 
Barracks were the coffins that held the living
like rows of ribs rising and falling in unison;
like small defiant fires in a world of ice. 
 
Dreams were exchanged under uprooted trees like contrabands.
As rhythms of death marched in,
their slow, deliberate cadence of boots
worn by my friends who were taught foreign tongues
practiced to toy with a godless lottery of borrowed time. 
 
I heard in worlds that don’t end with —Lia, —Ria, —Ine, —Iti
they fight to build identities.
Here, I choose to be invisible; without name
wearing frost and dust like second skin. 
 
As I write on a bomb-exploded paper, 
I see liberation come, sudden and strange;
Freedom feels like a coat that doesn’t fit;
Breads taste like gruel
And our stomachs continue to shrink.
 
As I search for faces on burnt grounds,
a shadow held my hand and showed me 
the stars.
 
* Arbeit macht frei, German for ‘work liberates’