This poem was a finalist for Plough’s 2024 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award.

I.
Once your mother, always your mother
Sine moj, I want to swaddle you
in the hand shorn slippers of my youth.
All that I have to give, to be
in tattered, sun-kissed pockets
crammed with sugar cubes
not soaked by a sour separation.

From wind tipped grasses of a hill country
teeming with pickled cabbage and drooping plums
to slouching shadows in towering high-rises
exhausted from the daily pursuit
of circling roundabouts without an exit,
I have come and find myself lost

in between the lj, đ, č, š, and ž.
The shadow of my former self swarms
about the vast void seeking these sounds
with their tongue twisting form.
A child of wobbly words in your world
I have become. Its forgetfulness in you
I refuse iz inata to mourn.

II.
In a cellar hidden from falling grenades
I found myself. Barred from flicking my lucky marble,
sea green nicked by tick of the clock,
I giggled at moja Dalida and picked up another
to play. “Clink!” One after the other they rolled
in the candlelit dust. She stomped off forever
forging her own roša into the crumbling cement floor.

III.
The mother of your mother
Her voice, in the tunnels where my thoughts wade
through muddled memories, faintly still waxes and wanes:

Pogledaj im kroz prste, sine moj.

Notes:

sine moj: Literally “my son,” but in Balkan culture it can also imply “my daughter.”

lj, đ, č, š, and ž: letters of the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian alphabet, the lj is like the “lli” in million, the đ is the ‘’j’’ in jump, ž sounds like ‘’s’’ in the word “measure.”

iz inata: out of spite

moja: “my”; when used with a first name, it can speak of a close female friend.

roša: a hole found or created for the Balkan version of marbles

Pogledaj im kroz prste: an idiom which literally means, “Look at others through the gaps of your fingers.” Figuratively, it means to overlook another’s mistakes.

Photograph by Yalim Vural. Used by permission.