After “Kristallnacht” occurred in Nazi Germany, female Jews who did not have “typically Jewish” given names were forced to add “Sara” to official identification cards.
Onchi Kōshirō, Form No. 5: Affection for Shapeless Things, 1948
Object print
Image Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
Sara and
Sara and
Sara and
Lotte
each carry
a crystal
balloon
Sara’s rises
floats up high
then hiccups with a
hitch on
a chimney
Sara reads
her tiny
fortune and
sees it crack
so she packs
her trunk
Fragile
and swallows
her future fast
Sara’s vanishes
into a cattle car
where thousands of
balloons are herded
and when she goes
to find it in Poland
she never comes back
Lotte makes
hats on the
Lower East side
using shards
in lieu of
feathers or ribbon
Nothing cuts like
aftermath except
a taxi line tether
from wrist leading back
to a green hill
in the distance where heads
like light bulbs line
the path
Sara to Sara to Sara
and their
blazing
vanishing
point