Day 1,038

The girl sits in front of her tent
learning English vocabulary.
She’s ten. No real school
since the genocide started,
but her hunger to learn
is as deep as her hunger for food.
She learns by heart names
of the things she encounters
each day: Drone. Tank. Sniper.
Smoke. Repeats them to herself.
Amputee. Pain. Skeleton. Skull.
Burial, she learns; and
the terms for kinship. Uncle
and cousin and aunt. Great-
grandmother. Buried, she says
to herself: all buried. All
under dirt. Under the earth? she
wonders. She’ll ask
her one older sister still living
which would be more correct.