Editor’s Note: Kerry Arquette’s book of poems, War Cries: Unheard Voices, Unmarked Graves is now available for pre-order here.

via artistkerryarquette.com

What would you do if you were only eighteen

and put in a ghetto where your mother and sister starved

then sent with your father to a labor camp

to rise before dawn, discovering your bedmates dead,

then roll call—four hours in driving snow or soul searing heat—

and you couldn’t wear your hat so it beat on your head

while the man beside you buckled and collapsed and another

was dealt a rib-crushing blow and another muttered insanities

and another, covered in pustules and burning with fever,

vomited on your shoes and another was shot before your eyes

and then hours walk to a job hauling heavy bags of concrete

until your back bent and holes in your feet bled and oozed

and breakfast was a piece of bread and lunch, thin soup,

and the yells and the screams and the slams and

babies tossed into the air for target practice

and you can see your bones through your skin

and children unloaded from trains, gas,

and mothers screaming, children crying

and your tooth aches

 and smoke and smells

and you just can’t bear it,

you just can’t bear it

you just can’t bear it

what would you do?

I wasn’t trying to escape.

Just  to die.