Tea Gerbeza

My Father Tells Me About the Yugoslavian Civil War

On the eve of my eighteenth birthday                I find my father in our garage

sitting on the browned couch                                 with his right palm beside him mid-tap,

an invitation for someone to join                     but no one is here & he’s stuck like that,

wading through a crowd                                      of ghosts until I sit across from him.

He rises                                               tries to cure

my broken teenage heart                            with a midnight barbeque. Look, he says, the moon 

is a balloon for you tonight.                                   He tells me ghosts are pictures in his head

& we must give in                                                      to the ongoingness, the way our past

decides our rituals. Was his always                      this? Seated at the couch, knees pressed

into the plywood coffee table                              & a half-filled shot                        

of plum brandy grasped                                    between fingertips discoloured

from years of smoking.                                        Do his ghosts                                                          

blame him                                                                     for surviving?

With a shot of my own, we raise                               spirit to sky, beckon a caesura

punctuated by slow sips.                                        My father tells me about the war:

I was lying in the dirt & a sniper’s bullet                  shot right above my head.

ZOOM, my hair stood up like this.                                         He moves his hand                 

         fast through his buzz cut.                                       Tries to make these memories liquid

   so he can live                                                           with them & not wake my mother

each night with his screams.                                I kissed the ground, nowhere deeper I could go.

You know, when you were little                      you used to come into my room

wake me from my nightmare                                                    with your small hand

over my heart saying ‘Daddy, daddy                          sta je bilo?’—

The charred chicken reminds him                              why we’re out here. To cheer me up,

he pulls a poem I wrote                                    from his wallet, reads it aloud, enacts

his mispronunciations                                     with movements to prove he knows

what each word means.                                          Heh-si-tat, he puffs his chest like a bird,

means it stops.                                                                                       The lacuna that opens

in the slip of it                                             instead of I

unmoors him. I reach                               for his chest, place my palm

over his heart, invite his ghosts                      to wrest in me.

Would the Comma Be Blue 

Rearrange where the bed is, put it in the corner by the closet, right beside the door then no one will be able to come in, tell you to freshen the room, it’s starting to smell like wet ash except you don’t smoke so what’s the smell from, the bed feels all wrong, move it again underneath the window, you forgot how warm the sun is and now is not a time for warmth, so you move the bed again, trade places with his desk, break the dusty blue mug, what a cliché the colour blue is, if punctuation had colour would the comma be blue, its purpose to pause, breathe, soothe, no remember commas also disrupt, run,-on stilt, breath, what’s the point of this list anyway, you can’t sleep against a wall, why did his father ask, you to come couldn’t someone else rearrange this room, who will water your aloe plant, you probably drowned, it too much water will do that, do commas signal breath, or are commas always grieving, you move the bed back to the far wall, put on fresh sheets, the cheap jersey blend with the branches, you’d tease him, say the branches match your crow’s feet, the edges of his eyes always crinkled, the sheets scratched his back just right when he shifted in his sleep, how long ago was that, when you slept here last and he put baby powder on your rash, why is there always cold coffee in this mug, god it’s all over the carpet like a comma splice, right, he kept cold coffee on his desk, so if he ever woke, in the middle of the night, he’d drink some to stay awake, to draw the magpies as the sunrise billowed their blue, you lie down all wrong,

save room for him,

On My Scoliotic Anatomy