Ana Božičević

Eloquent Silence of everyone I ever loved This cloudy Friday evening Spring but still cold A smattering of new buds Who's that Swaddled in The uneasy atmosphere In silence No chatter or pleasant surprise The lusty rush of a weekend With the beloved Who's that Sprouting now out of The cottony silence With silky whips Still hanging from their little chops Who is it straining To pop out Of the hardwood Rings of time Into the cool air Like there's another cool world On the other side of this one Worth pushing Through to or maybe We're already there Is that Why we shake

Amy, Amy, at this distance you’re the smell of liver, tinnitus that keeps me up, afraid: your fortressness must now be tested. The way you took me in without a surfeit click or gesture: seagull kerchief binding my gut to safety on the swimming haul among night-images.       I went to the place I was born and it plainly was a bride. So I ran after her. When she turned into a star I swallowed her. And out of this uneasiness will come an aster. Amy, I’m inside my granddad’s mind of wood: the grass is finer, constellations thicker. The plums are normal. How much sugar did you buy alone at Waldbaums? Brook reeds here wake from your hair’s soul’s chilly patronage. The hair’s the soul, the reeds its body—alone in their beds like schoolgirls: I feel and feel them up. The cigarettes have made them crazy! But a rabbit someone flows out of the embankment and I shiver for you, Amy oh lengthy dappled wig: there’s a swan in your breathing. There always is.

The tuba wakes before the man. It’s a content animal: having no word, for the moment, suits it fine. It looks at him with a dun and smooth interiority, as a glass of rum might, or a worn number on an apartment building: his hands, crossed on the chest, rise and fall with breathing. In the dream, he’s ringing the bell now; climbing, unlocking the door, peering into a glass. The flat is empty. Is the war over yet? Or was he here before the war? Soon, dropping salt levels will wake him— in tears, with an odd groove in his palm, as though he’d held on to an instrument for hours. For a good minute, he’ll be nameless, and when a name does come, it won’t be his: humming in thought the bright last name he rang on the doorbell, he’ll see, in a certain abrupt sunlight: he’d chosen her, then— to be able to call everything something.

I’m alone until I’m asleep, and there you are: naked, you take my hand:Shhhh! We tiptoe through a black-blue meadow. To the pond behind the farmhouse. (The farmer sleeps in the blind window.) No cicadas even, maybe just maybe Venus — & this is before Wednesday, everything’s alright, we tiptoe ‘round the house as around a painful subject — & we’re at the pond! And now it’s time. To use vague holy-man speech, like: I am another face in your hand, the face of your eye — wing-surrogates, the word bones— it’s time for afternoon, them white-blank architectures. No, veil. Nothing’s glistening. Christmas, Christmas. It’s time for you to forgive me: I was forced to eat valises that wouldn’t close by themselves — that was just a dream, good morning: regurgitate the stars and the soot

When it’s that time of month it’s like falling backwards in “time.” God has abandoned her glass carriage, she is “dead.” And the edges of objects: wavy in the eye that’s about to cry, a twitter running down the spine of… Oh God, it can’t be. (Insert song of mourning.) God and time, spine of the world— yawn, blah, blah, schma… what I meant to say is it’s hard to be a capitalist. If the world’s time is God, and she’s birds atwitter, then why must I go to work? The answer writes itself: left to my own devices I’d just sink into the soil. That is, write, with dirt as my pillow.   In the hole between twitters there’s random patches of mud-sky. So humid. There’re chairs growing in hell. There’re chairs growing in hell, and people sit on them, my co-workers: it’s like riding on toadstools except you don’t know it, or you kind of know it that time of month. That’s when you feel the twitter, the muddy shiver. You dream of your uncle turning a lamb on a spit high on a green cliff, with fog thickening around him and then he’s made to swallow keys and little hammers— you claw the red clay. Now wake. Show me the bouquet! No, don’t show me the bouquet. Show me the bouquet! If you do, I won’t tell on you to the rose of the world. She can make him hear you up there. Besides, it’s not a cliff, it’s a chair. And the rose is God. Got it? Gott it? This is why women should be President.