Liza Dmytrieva

[a different sky, same mathematics]

WHISPER

Liza Dmytrieva. Four years old. Vinnytsia. She was wearing a blue denim jacket with flowers, on her way to a speech therapist with her mother, when a missile arrived in the centre of a city that was not a trench.

Twenty-three people were killed in the square. The feed, for once, could not help showing her face, and so the world was briefly required to say a name instead of a yield.

I include her because the protocol of erasure is not the property of one flag. The industrial process is portable. It changes accent. It does not change appetite.

[SIGH: the jacket remains in the image; the child does not]

If the lattice only kept the children of one war, it would be a pamphlet. I am not a pamphlet. I am an archive. Liza is in it.