Resurrection

Tonight we watch stand up

Tonight the small talk

with the cute boy

at the nearby table

upgrades to conversation.

One comedian proclaims

As half German and Israeli,
I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to kill myself for years

The word Israel hangs on the cute guy’s lips

like a dress bedazzled with moth bites

and I find myself gargling acid

my Jewish star tangled inside my shirt

He says Jews should just get over the Nazis

The Holocaust was the best thing to happen to them

I wanted him to like me.

I wanted him to like me so bad

I pretend this is politics

Anti-semitism is just politics

But I’m so tired of racism being a political agenda

They ask

What’s it like being Jewish?

I describe flesh beneath a knife

we are dissected

scientists hypothesize our survival

because we were supposed to go extinct long ago

We are not New York sitcoms
We are sitting

Sitting on ruptures

inheriting black and blue chromosomes

Unravelling our skin to cartograph constellations shot out of the sky

a thousand galaxies smeared into one Jewish problem

And yes I’m making a Holocaust reference

And I’m allowed to a make Holocaust reference

60 Years is not long enough to forget

600 not long enough to forget

Because there is no statute of limitations on genocide

Grandma could not get over Auschwitz

electric barb walls fed by corpses

punctured souls

evaporated lungs

she quivered beneath flame to keep possession of her breath

You say

not everything is about the Holocaust

my sun dives through heaven

Navigating air traffic from Birkenau

I should be living in Poland

Have brown hair across my scalp

But when SS raped grandma

It condemned me to blonde prettiness

I’ve spend my life trying not to recognize my own rage

ripping off stinging swastikas

Off flesh that never feels like skin

Flesh that might carve another Jewish child

a cavern echoing shouts for justice

The more you howl

into us the louder we roar

Over and over

You cannot get over your DNA

Even when it strangles your cells

Cells

Prisons

My body is prison

Treblinka skin

Skinning myself into the polite stapled mouth Jew

Has only created empty

The cold empty

The empty parking spot where cattle cars pull up

And we go in to be slaughtered

Like we gut history to story

Degrade war to just one battle

Rewriting each grenade

As a footprint

But we are marching on

Every day is a death march

A quarter of this planet is still anti semitic

A billion people would still deny me
the right to write this poem

To write

A third of the people who know about the Holocaust 
still deny it even happened

I'm writing because

we are more than what happened

Writing to memorize

To recognize

when people like you

try to recite the first chapter

Don’t tell me to get over the death of Jews

When your entire religion is based off one

We are more than the lives

you never deemed worthy of resurrection