I dreamed I was breastfeeding
a bear
it was a brown bear
grizzly
a true wild animal
powerful, artless
I dreamed accurately
to scale
it was larger than me
its jaws overwhelmed
my breast, body
bade it welcome ...
Buried Treasure
I used to think of tenderness
as a kind of spindle we could both, each
differently, revolve around
together. Likewise, until not so
long ago, I still believed that
keeping a lamp on at night could keep away
all ghosts, when really it only works for
some ghosts,
not the worst ones,
for whom it’s all the same – darkness,
illumination…
When I spoke
of vanishing, I meant without
a whiff of retreat
anywhere, no knocked-over winecup with its chipped ...
When I walk across the Square, or even beside it, I see those winding sycamores beyond the black wrought iron fence, the garden and grass and trees, the fountain I know in the center, rectangular, and the benches along the…
Late in 2017, with a breeze off the Bay of Bengal stirring through the tongue-shaped leaves, I sat under an ancient banyan and listened to the voices of birds I couldn’t name while that banyan moved imperceptibly closer to the waters of the Indian Ocean.
I recorded the birds in the branches as they called out to one another. I recorded the birds as they flew away and as they rowed their wings through the morning air and as they made their way into canopies of light and shade. I thought about where I was on this planet, and just how lost I was in my life. ...
A character in Ferida Duraković’s poem “Cosmos blossoms, Sarajevo” gestures to a building destroyed in war and says, “Still, this city is incredible.” Three Sarajevo-based or -born artists have contributed to this package of work, exploring themes such as home, isolation, loss, love, wartime, migration, and aftermath. Ferida Duraković co-founded Bosnia and Herzegovina’s PEN chapter in 1992 during the siege of Sarajevo and served as its executive director for more than twenty years. She is a major voice in the region’s literature and has mentored and encouraged a wave of younger writers, including Selma Asotić. Literary translator Mirza Purić provided new translations of several of Ferida’s poems written before, during, and after the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Along with his translations, the feature includes the original Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) texts. Selma Asotić, a bilingual poet from Sarajevo now based in the US, released her award-winning ...
Wartime HaikuA mortar breaks its fast
The bombs are mum now
In the sole tree-crown
A sparrow chirping
Pitch-black night how dark you are
No more chestnuts left
Behind the blind window panes
How long is the night ...
Ratni HaikuMinobacač doručkuje
Granate šute
U preostaloj krošnji
Vrapčić cvrkuće
Tamna noći tamna li si
Nema kestena
Pod slijepim oknima
Duga je noć ...
My father’s skin looks like the surface of the moon
They told you shrapnel made men
celestial, that’s why you joined
the army. In midsummer, when weathervanes
carousel, you pull your silence
taut over our house. Nothing bad
will happen to us now, not with you
standing sentinel at the edge
of our sleep, guarding
against the peacethieves. ...
Baba, open your mouth so I can see your uvula,
the three-year-old granddaughter keeps saying.
And I don’t want to display my crowns to the one
calling me Baba which, strictly speaking,
means Old Hag but was easier than Obaachan
for a one-year-old and maybe I am, given the dental issues.
And maybe she’ll keep up her investigation so
I hand over my mobile: Take selfies of your own uvula!
And that works until she gets another great idea:
How about you find a picture of a whale's uvula? ...
I wake with a start at midnight. A nightbird striking the window? A bat in the eaves? Maybe someone in the theater of my sleep gave me a nudge—someone I don’t know in waking life. It is cloudy and warm…
