Fifty years later the post brings my father’s first Christmas card since remarrying, a photograph snapped from the summit of Machu Picchu, him and his second wife, the one who travels, peering into the mist of this stony place, and I wonder what it is I am supposed to witness, other than a happiness. I wonder who this picture is for. Only my heart refuses what the eye cannot deny. And I wonder if its clench is the one that will help me survive, or the one that will keep this carousel turning.

Benchmark

Benchmark

Two years since

she came to me

in a dream, my sleep

these days shallow

and absent, like

dual carriageways

you see on beaches

in the off-season when

no one is there

except a man who walks

his dog as a reminder

to do something

in retirement.

Return

Return

I went back to the city we visited, to

the restaurant, to the bar

where we saw the twilight fade

and stood outside the hotel

we returned to in the noisy night, the sleepless

doorman reading Red Harvest,

he wasn’t there, and after hours

the city convulsed with an ugliness,

helicopters overhead to keep the crowds

of tourists at bay, and, at the bar,

the crowd wasn’t so nice,

and in the restaurant I tried to find in that evening’s diners some flash

of her hair or our hands across the table,

instead I caught only my reflection in the hazy mirror,

blurred and only apparently mine

when he bent as I did to finish

the meal that tasted of nothing,

not even the memory of what it was once.

Pumpkins at Night

Pumpkins at Night

Caged in display,

torn from roots

before ripe,

gourds full of seeds

unsown. The lights

on, beckoning

people off the slick

night street

with neon signs,

promising festivity,

but this is New York:

no one’s buying it.

Fish

Fish

For Aleksandar Hemon

Americans are peculiar about breakfast,

you say as we belly to the sushi bar

in the rain, eight in the morning, man with blistered

forearms, gut-slick knife, curious where

we’re from. I say New York, you say Chicago,

although I know that’s a complicated

answer, yet how you’ve learned

to love it, as fierce as your jaws,

squared-down on cuttlefish and tuna,

eel and giant prawns, moments ago

scrabbling with twelve terrified legs

to escape their tank atop five of

their brethren; it’s just breakfast,

washed down with green tea grown in

Shizuoka steeped in water from

the Arakawa River watershed.

When you first went back to Sarajevo

after the siege stranded you in America,

the water tasted different, like

ash, you say, and the cinemas

had moved, blocks of houses

plain evaporated, and most

of your friends upstream

in Montreal or Paris,

where, once, we bellied up to a

mosque tagine joint and ate

couscous with Bosnians who

chewed French words into chunks

the Moroccan chefs could understand.