“and even you forgot those brilliant flashes seen from afar” -Ruth Stone

SOFT POEM


I came

I slept
I came
I looked up
The sky was the blue
Of a baby powder bottle
From a country
That no longer
Exists
The softest breeze
Touched the
Honeysuckle perimeter
I was feeling a
Little nice
Current in my body
Nikola are you with me
Gods of thunder
Ancestors
If I called out to you
Would you answer
In this land

 

 

MOONRING


While I sit here thinking

Of the apocalypse
Leaves are bouncing
Moonbeams against my window
Like heartstrings
Did they always know
This song?

After all the shows
I’ve watched and stories
I read
After what I saw my family
Survive will I stand and
Fight
Fight against what?

Tell me, moonbeams
Little fists
Smacking the window
Which way to turn and in
What language to say
What thing
And to whom.

I keep thinking
I don’t deserve to be here.
Not in this body
This family
Not in this country or the other.
I keep thinking
I need to do something

And I do all the things
With the dread and joy
Of someone cursed hoping.
Eyes in my fingernails
Stare me in the eye
When I type
They are my honor

Every word a nail
Holding a promise to
A wall… will it be full
In the end of desperate notes
Crafted by moonbeams
In seasickness
Or totally empty?

This time of month
I leave myself a ring
On a beam of moon
That I can wear again
When I’m small enough again
To bear the weight
Of my name.

 

Appears in this issue

Ana Božičević was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and emigrated to New York City in 1997 where she studied at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her second book, Rise in the Fall (2013) won a Lambda Literary Award.

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