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
keen.
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
Hua Ai (aka Nikolina / Nicole / NK.A.Hwaet) is an MA student in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and holds a BA in English Literature from King’s College London. She is a published feminist fiction writer back in China since the age of fifteen, her English-language poetry has won four international awards and been nominated for Best of the Net. Her work often explores spiritual animality, intersectional feminism, and sisterhood. She is currently completing her debut literary fiction novel in English, centered on themes of fragility, disconnection, survival, and emotional reconstruction amid political unrest. She is also the mother of five rescue cats. She’s on Medium: medium.com/@huasmoroz2000
