For remembrance, the picture of her girlish dark-haired freshness and a taut, three-paragraph bio was posted on a flagpole
For a week, students passed her, too wrapped in their own bad days and stressors, their own crosses to bear, to notice
Hiding, maneuvering,
Creating a bottomless sense of chaos
Dora had spent her wonder years as a partisan
Making, makeshift weapons out of lost parts
Sleeping in forests
Using her trusty machine gun as a pillow
Evading, plotting,
breathing almost to the date of liberation
She had escaped the ghettos,
the trains rides, the liquidations
Until, too many Germans surrounded,
demanding they produce a Jew
Disarmed, momentary solidarity melted to basic instinct
Someone pointed out Dora
They bound her hands
Tied a rock to her neck
Threw her in the river
Then shot her twice
An empty, gray ending to a would-have-been
full, green life
Under other circumstances…