Photo by Bob Ramsak / pirancafe.com
After a while it became a routine: scrubbing laundry in the Miljacka,
stringing engine oil canisters to wheelbarrows or sleds,
or just holding them, like clusters of white balloons,
while edging down the rail of the bridge with the missing deck—
a wrinkled lineup swerving across that hollow stone arch,
down the bank, for the greasy plastic to gulp the river.
Up the waterside men cut oaks to stumps, spare the linden,
and trams, also hollow, rot stiff, their cables burnt worms.
Among anise and thistle, a wheelchair, a woolly blanket pulled
to a tarnished face, a pair of chalky eyes gazes at a house sizzling.
Across the road, by a boarded-up čevabdžinica joint, another man
sits and stares at the dust of his slippers, the bangle-folds of his socks.
A side street lined with mortar and trash, and again a barrow:
100 Deutsche Marks for a sack of firewood—the sack is hemp,
and the cart’s tire is flat. There, a boy rides by on a bike, past a heap
of charred Yugos and Fiats, past the spray-painted Watch out. SNIPER,
under a stream of facades aerated like chocolate—and one balcony
with dripping shirts, a carnation potted in a coffee tin.
The boy loops around the confetti of blown concrete in a courtyard
of a mosque, past fat-ankled women hoisting children down Heroes’
Square,
past men playing chess on the corroded hood of a Volkswagen, against
the backdrop of the bludgeoned courthouse, the toothless library,
past the fast-clacks through debris, clutched loaves of bread,
more Run or R.I.P. signs nailed to posts, the cyclist not heeding
the sickle-shape of a couple’s legs on the sidewalk, or the fuchsia
duffel coat with fingers curled in the red drool under her mouth,
up to the cemetery—the fermenting piles—where a man in a tux
with a cello stranded between knees, rubs the bow raw.
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.