1. Srebrenica,
The name sounds like a sweet pastry,
like something you bite into, crinkled layers, revealing a saccharine
syrup that dances around the crevices between your teeth - like your tongue
would long for -
Can I have some more Srebrenica?
I never made it there in my travels.
To be honest, amongst the Yugoslav cities, I’d never heard it
pronounced.
And you have to hear them pronounced or you can’t buy a bus
ticket, because you say things like an American:
L jub l johna… Sara gevo … Mostar
Far more honey-lull and fairytale sweet, of their true names.
But again to be fair, I was told not to show interest, or
lose myself in the cities like I am wont to do, or go hiking in the forested
hills and definitely not the valleys between them.
told not to go at all… and if you must -
2. Don’t
ask!
Better to keep these sounds from the tongue
-so as not to hear,
some guttural knot passed from wall to wall through the
esophagus, the nausea- constricted, an ancient growl when words don’t suffice,
like a whimper escaping tight to the teeth, a whispered name that can’t fill
the hollows
Silence please
plead the muscles of the face,
the down turned eyes,
eyes that look away, blink too slowly, blink too much, don’t blink
at all.
The silence of eyes pressed so tight ---that what ---cannot
be choked,
cascades.
3. What a
clatter it must have been, they say more than ten thousand
-fathers and sons, their tennis
shoes, business loafers, flip flips,
under a July sky -tap ; smack
; clapping along the road to Tuzla.
Sometimes in the stories
they call it a column. Lined up one by one, each father and son, one by one, by
one, by one, by one, by one, by one, by one, by one, by one, by one, by one, by
one…
-there are 206 bones in
the human skeleton, what does it sound like when each one is
quivering… one by one, by one, by one, beside a loved one whose bones, all 206
of them are quivering… one by one, by one, by one. Through the long march,
until bullet holes fill them… one by one
by one by one… until of that 10 -8,000 fathers and sons... gone.
4. Every
one of my nephews’ 206 bones and flesh, seems to love trucks, fire
trucks, monster trucks, but especially construction trucks -dump trucks, cement
mixers, bulldozers… he plays with his toys, crashes them into one another, imitates
the sounds, and he corrects me when I get it wrong… but he still
invites me to come over and play.
I wonder how many of those boys played with trucks, if they
could imitate the sounds just right, if they invited their neighbors to come
over and do the same.
I
bet not in a million billion trillion years did a single one of those kids,
Bosniak or Serb -ever -ever -ever -ever!
imitate the sound,
of
their bulldozer,
plowing
through the bones
of
their playmates.
5. On the radio today, I heard the Butcher
of Bosnia died in his prison cell.
And
I started weeping,
Because
Ljubljana converted their military base to a free space for artists and
musicians.
Because I've seen the dead commemorated with roses in Sarajevo.
Because
the bridge Stari Most was rebuilt to mend the divided community.
But
the once sweet sounding name of Srebrenica, makes me fuckin sick to my stomach.
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