From “Please Bury Me in This”

by Allison Benis White

The sound of wind through a fence, or long hair being brushed.

As a child my father told me everyone in his family was killed in Belzec except his uncle.

Years later, I sat on a bed in a replica of Anne Frank’s room at a museum, stunned.

The way we try to feel close, to animate emptiness.

I looked up and saw nothing hanging from the ceiling, like a chandelier.

*Photo courtesy Giorgio Raffaelli.