ON THE SHORES WE LIVED
 
In woods where history hangs itself,
laments trail skulls along the Miljacka,
each a foreign season,
each already split.
 
Collapsed libraries, Latin Bridge:
the Sava stares back,
Sarajevo's wound.
 
How far will hunger drive a body over borders?
 
Waves return with the condemned's feathers.
Seagulls marshal the water that swallowed my first home.
I kneel, ransacked. Only the dead
giggle at release.
A half-burnt torch before cold icons,
spring wind rattles the votive racks:
counterfeit peace never ours.
Steamboat hulls, fish ribs,
evidence against empires.
History splits awake.
 
I stand in the after-bombardment shiver.
Water carries us, merciless as governments,
to shores that refuse our names.
Certainty comes like midnight deportation:
 
movements' necks snapped by yellow borders,
our homeland's twilight forced down our tongues.
They promised honey and milk
 
while diplomas vanished at customs,
CVs rotted in mailboxes.
 
We counted tips from our whipped breasts,
guitar dreams gone mute,
contracts unstitching our right to leave.
Dancers and singers downgraded to wannabes
under Soho's red lights.
 
Beggar hands,
cauterised
by childhood's fuse,
 
deafened us to omens
whistling through bullet casings.
Hatchlings in their shells
watch mothers wade into the machine-gunned distance.
Their children, jagged languages,
face Black Sea cargoes,
traffickers of breath and skin.
 
They whisper, thin as rationed bread:
In March, swallows will cut us
into petitions for the camera.
In May, peace doves will harvest
our corpses
for museum sorrow.
 
When we lie alone
beneath the river's militarised belt,
our blood will turn to morbid blue,
 
linking soils of unremembered cities
under one bank
that gathers
all our scattered bones.
 


Dreaming Of The Yangtze Flood
 
The stench of all the rotting crowns
That drowns out every dream.
 
A tǔ gǒu picks its brittle path
Across the hut’s drowned brow
To find us sisters, clasped and
keening.
 
Down on the Yangtze’s floor, a blue
enamel basin turns—
A tiny moon, a flooded cradle,
Rocking the name no one would claim.
Why is a daughter a debt paid to the
river?
Who gorges on her mother’s toil, and
still denies her seat?
 
Our lungs—are filled with taste of men:
The lie, the sex, the sour breath.
 
I turn
To face my father’s stare.
He turns and walks alone.
 
We sisters, before death,
Will open comely mouths and
spit
them
out.
 

Author’s Biography