It’s a self-defeating act, writing the 100-word bio,
but what about the footnotes? How my dad’s bones
decay to chalk outside the curved palm of Kvarner Bay,
and how its forefinger still motions, lures back?
’92, the year before he died on the last day of summer,
how the war relieved the tired coastline of busloads
of Slovaks: no longer gawking around Diocletian palace
in Split, no longer snapping their disposable Kodaks
at the salt-washed pillars of the arena in Pula, the ancient
game field getting its proper rest. As was the local
kiosk, with its metal lids pulled down, where as a kid,
on the first of each month, I used to stand on my toes,
clutch firmly to the sliding layers of newspapers
to buy cigarettes for Dad, and the new vacuum-packed
Erotika. How the grocery yawned quietly, each shelf
a showcase—a handful of cookie boxes, a few plum preserves.
The radio station swaddled with sandbags. How later,
in a friend’s house—perpetually under construction—
that ripe July Sunday morning spent inside warm brick walls,
a skinny boy also smoked Ronhills, and how they’d peek
from the soft pack—wafer-like, white—on a single mattress
streaked with wine, a wraparound skirt some uncle
brought from a trip to Nepal. How the two sixteen-year-olds
held the room then, tight-lipped and cross-legged at first.
You smell like Indian apricots, he muttered. She disagreed
but said nothing, his mouth later circling between the folds
of fabric, miming the sun pattern of the skirt print
in a breezy, wettish manner, like poisonous rain, and that hand,
the hand she thought she knew, the hand I thought strong,
stopped his head, a punctuation before the end.
Image may be NSFW.
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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.
