Croatia, ’92, Cease-Fire
Other than cypress columns, macchia and dried condoms
there isn’t much interesting. Papier mâché cliffs
are flecked with gull scat, the sea tarp is still, and the sky
an apron sunk in dishwater. An odd tourist
sprawls on gravel like sourdough on a baker’s slab,
flies court with figs, the cracked-nipple fruit leaks,
and the fallen, tar-black flesh stinks of cheap wine.
I fiddle with a drop of sweat sliding down my belly—
it breaks like a man falling off an arched bridge.
Vukovar, a flabby flank cleaved by a switchblade;
Plitvice Lakes, a blooming minefield.
It’s that muddy sweat that spreads like the popularity
of a new national hero. Razbit ću ti pičku ustašku!
he yells, then rapes a Croatian, or any other deserving
cunt, smirks through missing incisors, mindless,
he could be banging sacks of nails. He shoves meat
into a man’s brindled beard—his grandson’s liver—
later, strings their fingers on a necklace. A souvenir.
Meanwhile, the uncle I don’t speak with passes time turning
lambs on a spit, and local hotels are infested with refugees.
In a couple of hours, I head to my summer job—
bar tending to dissipating locals and UN peacekeepers
who hold drinks better than peace. After rounds
of blindfolded pointing and gulping of hard liquor,
pug-snout bellowing YAAAHs!, they leave crumpled kunas
across warped tables. I put the cash aside for the owner,
and for a moment feel like a trained circus seal.
They like the Adriatic, they say; sun-rinsed girls, too,
but I suspect they like them anywhere they go.
Dede used to spend afternoons on his rattan chair
fixing nets. At dusk he’d unlash his white wooden boat
and row out the fairway to cast them. He repeated,
Red light at night, sailor’s delight. Now dawns are scabbed—
each more vacant, hardened. Itchy and bothered,
like the itch of an amputee’s foot. Afternoons, though, still feel fine.
We fool around by the shore, roll pine needles
in the absence of grass.
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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.
