Carly Sachs

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They let certain women keep their hair,
those were the soldiers' women,
always the ones most recently off the train
who were given soap and water
then taken naked to a concrete room
where the soldiers would shove the heads
of their rifles inside them.

Sent back to the women's barracks
beauty gone, the other women
picked on the bones,
scavenged these broken bodies
for jewelry, a hidden tube of lipstick,
the mirror, though no one
wanted to see what they had become.