red paint pulsating with your one-track message bet you wielded that brush with conviction.

i’m imagining you now, how you plunged the paintbrush down into a bucket of the cheap hue the scent of acrylic making the colors go soft around you. did they bleed into each other?

and i watch you drag the letters down making your “j” twisted and deformed “Jews are not wanted here.”

you knew eventually a Jewish girl would find herself confronted by your grotesque calligraphy… her world would go dark and the quick-brush cadence of her musical mind would mute.

she would recall the stench of gas the slap-thrash commands of a man in uniform because hate likes to echo through pieces of space

and the colors around her would go soft and bleed into each other.

Hannah Ascher is a 17-year-old poet and singer-songwriter. She is a member of Sinai Temple and a rising senior at Brentwood School. She wrote this poem after seeing a sign on a college campus that said, in splattered red paint, ‘You can’t be a Zionist and an environmentalist.’ She recently released a folk-pop album called “Making Space.”

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