Time and Place Tuesday, 22 February 1994 (Washington) It is difficult to arrange the days in retrospect, because time has shifted. We flew for nine hours on Sunday, setting off at 11:30 a.m. that day and arriving here in the afternoon at approximately 2 p.m. They say that it takes less time to fly back from here. The position of […]
He should have a tranquil face saying how you were together once and how those times glow beyond all other times. There should be two women you two have pleased countless times, whose little laurels of fat tremble delicately when they smile. There should also be a beach, a pebbled beach, and a couple of kids gazing at the pebbles […]
Wayles Browne Farasha Euker Stephanie Krueger Amira Sadiković Sasha Skenderija
When the famous 1985 New York Times Book Review polemic between Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky (the latter, a poet; the former, a novelist—but I like them both more as essayists) came again into my hands after several years, I let myself be seduced by the text out of habit, enchanted by the beauty of the authors’ sentences—until I eventually […]
When he’s, usually after midnight, returning home, the cold concrete of the staircase is waiting for him, and he, such as he is, cannot control the tidal wave of ontology: what is when what is he’s what is returning what is home what is what …? In front of the entrance, he starts shaking empirically and sees himself as Ulysses […]
K&T Meats is my favorite butcher shop on Broadway, in Astoria. It resembles me of those in Vitez, Maglai, and other small Bosnian towns, except this one’s jointly owned by six or seven immigrants—Greeks and Romanians—who, apart from English, speak a meat-market hash of all the Balkan languages, even Hungarian, since their customers’ meat recipes, products, and foods come from […]
AWARD In the courtyard of the National Library, workers are loading a truck filled to the brim with obsolete books, sentenced to death by combustion in the city’s heating plant in order to free shelf space for new popular items. The truck moves and a few lighter copies drop onto the sidewalk. A thin one with a maroon paperback cover […]
Consider Karl of Ernstthal A. k.a. Kara Ben Nemsi Who’d never been To Ottoman Turkey And only posthumously Bore the Wild West Clear to South Dakota Where a Shatterhand Would as soon kick aside As make a sidekick Of a Lakota (Sioux) Or of a Winnetou And the day is not saved To be savoured By a Hitler Who eats […]
To Milorad Pejić You who are said to have tracked the reindeer’s scent, I couldn’t follow you. Not because, where you live, images are sharp as razors, nor because entering a warm place would dim my sight through fogged up glasses. Not for lack of strength: no one knows where it comes from nor what it is that makes him […]
I read papers when they’re just brought in from outside, from minus 27 degrees, fresh and cold off the presses. From all the morning papers I remember only one self-sustaining article: like the recipe for a simple cake, the list of scientific advances in 2003 was inserted between the ads and Christmas wishes. Glass has been invented that refracts at […]
a child in rubber boots wonders in the underground at the dripping grates holds up his hand to catch an emulsion of machine oil and water tells the rush hour crowd how he captured the sky there’s endless worrying about the simple fact about a stormy season the weather reports indicate showers at more than half probability and the shoulders […]
To Milorad Pejić I get out of bed – the first step into a new day and the body is flooded with sorrow the very moment it touches the ground, it shakes and whimpers like a plane touching down on a sunny winter afternoon, when kissed by its own shadow. Translated from the Bosnian by Wayles Browne © 2011 Wayles […]
I’ve been wondering how woefully few junkies and alcoholics there are amidst NPR’s contemporary American poets, even how few just plain smokers, and how woefully many non-smokers, vegetarians, globetrotters, and environmental activists. How many poetry magazine editors and non-profit publishers there are among all those award-winning authors of suburban and collegetown opuses, multiply divorced and remarried ex-hippies with paid-off mortgages […]
(a greeting) Twenty years before the first multiparty elections as I watched the sweltering road along the seacoast get rolled up on the wheels like spaghetti next to my father’s sweaty shoulder I was taking lessons in life I wondered why he (for no obvious reason) was honking now and then to the approaching cars and why they honked to […]
They taught us about the climate of Ethiopia, the sheep population of New Zealand. They taught us the area of the USSR and the countries we have borders with. When my next-door neighbor showed up wearing combat boots instead of slippers it occurred to me: the area of the USSR is subject to change as is the number of sheep […]
To Adin While the country I was born in was approaching its forced landing our life and football appetites were soaring high. Deaf and blind to the questions that’d started exploding right in our faces, we contemplated a starry future for ourselves, for posterity, for our national football team. Asked why he kept a player in the center of the […]
Those I know have all grown old, my scattered friends. The snow is getting rusty in Sweden, from the other side of the globe brief electronic messages buzz in: there’s a fire, or else there isn’t. No news is news anymore, they’ve heard it all – my tired friends. Memories are the only news we are still curious about. We […]
The earth has done its work. We wouldn’t have thought it, my brother and I, but a friend said to us “Your father’s gotten slimmer.” “Huh?” “His grave is sinking in!” We went to the gravedigger to order the gravestone. “Don’t worry,” he said, “everything will be just right.” But we wanted a solid gravestone, cost didn’t matter to us. […]
Asja P, the girl with a dog: sometimes I meet her walking her beautifully trained Irish setter. Her father was a philosopher, a well-known university professor, so I suppose he named his only daughter after Asja Lacis, who used to be the director of the theater in Riga. It was passionate love for Asja Lacis that made the Jewish mystic […]
A nighttime panorama of Sarajevo caught by the light of shellfire, gunpowder flashbulbs, by the dance of silhouettes in which only the persistence of vision can make out the former shapes (calling up flickering skyline lights, orange neon canyons, evening crescendos of headlights tracing their fluorescent snakes on a time exposure). But only this possible postcard can literally catch the […]