Day 1,020

This is a record
of how they were killed:
He was standing on the roof of his house.
(His house was still standing.)
She was bringing a bucket of water
to her grandmother’s tent, next to hers.
She was sitting in her tent, reading a book
she’d read twenty times before,
the one book she had. He
was combing his younger brother’s hair.
He was climbing a tree barren of leaves
to see if he could see his father
walking back from where
he had gone for food. He
was taking his first steps
across from his uncle, his one
surviving relative. She
was doing arithmetic homework,
assigned by her teacher
who had been teaching children
in a tent, with workbooks
she made herself. The child
was subtracting two-digit numbers
from other two-digit numbers
when suddenly she was shot
in the neck. Then she herself
had to be subtracted from the group
who met in the teacher’s
tent later that day. Count
the hours, the minutes. Count the children.
Count the bullets.