Photo by Markus Spring
The smoke bathes my throat like a warm
frost-shadow. Borut, the red-faced Slovene,
grins hard, the capillaries of his wade-blue eyes
burst like bottle rockets, or like the peonies
around his homegrown pot. Local semirebels
surround him now, safety pins and crosses
dangle off their earlobes, the bucktoothed boy
lingers midsentence, someone laughs,
and I wonder if it’s Borut’s face or my age
that’s amusing. I laugh because they seem happy,
huddled here under the lighthouse’s blinking eye
as boats bob, slosh off the island. The tape player
spools out the Clash, the Dead Kennedys
until our voices double back around the pier
and our talk loosens into silence: slow, clumsy
and plum with finale.
Below, the village sleeps
like a giant gray baby, and the third-shift waiters
have cleared the patios. As I trod to my square
house—each footfall softer—Jugo drags
the Adriatic to the shore with no noise, the salty
frothless pool around my ankles, and my
tween legs like two long masts on a boat.
Andrea O’Rourke’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Barrelhouse, Raleigh Review, Slipstream, Verse Wisconsin, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize Winner. A native of Croatia, she lives in Atlanta, where she attends the MFA program and teaches composition at Georgia State University, translates, and paints—oils on cotton paper and acrylics on canvas.