My Uncle's Farm

I loved these vacations on the farm of my aunt and uncle, because my life there was so different than at home. Everything was matter of fact. They had a black watch dog that was always chained to the dog house, never played with, and fed our leftovers. In my world people took walks with their dogs and fed them dog food. I chose the poem to be in the voice of my younger self.


Some summers I spend on my uncle’s farm.
The house smells like potatoes,
cider cellar, fresh air,
and my dead great-grandmother.

I am nine years old and driving tractor is
almost like being grown up.
The scent of freshly cut grass fills my small body
and lives inside me.
Makes me want to be a cow and chew slowly,
with that crunching sound.

A skinned rabbit hangs on the fence,
his eyes seemed still alive
as if caught in surprise.
Dinners are soup, dumplings, homemade bread,
and meat on white table cloth.

My older cousin Helmut hides a magazine
under his mattress and shows it to me
one evening.

In the morning I go with uncle Willi
to the pigeon coop.
It is built on stilts above a small creek
like a tree house.
He has so many birds
and sometimes he makes them fly away
with a letter wired to their leg.
He climbs up the ladder and comes back
with a pigeon.
Her eyes are like little pieces of coal
and a string of purple feathers
lines her neck like a necklace.
Her body is the color of dolphin.

Uncle Willi's two fingers
wrap around the pigeon's neck
and with a twist and a quick jerk
he rips off her head.
He tosses it into the river.
While he walks towards the house
with her body,
I watch her face swim away.

Once Upon a Time

Blackberry branches
in my grandmother’s garden
lick my four-year old feet.
Her voice is colored like tiger lilies
and rises beyond the fence
into the forest and the sky,
where she whirls the clouds
like pancake batter.

published: Big Pulp, March 2008

Threshold

I still get a kick out of the visuals accompanying my memories of “the first time.” His name was Albrecht. One of his eyes always looked tired.


Once I was in love with a blond angel.
His curls almost hid his tired eye.
Before I knew his caresses,
I was suspicious
of touch and saliva,
of hands on my breasts and thighs,
of the scent reminding me of pulsing death.
His casual love, insisting to be unimportant,
opened the first waves of woman love.
My indigenous inner girl stood by watching shyly,
with a dirty face.
Mute, with a hollow space to throw words into,
she watched as this ancient ache arose, quivered,
and broke to pieces.

How did it all begin?
In a sunlit, apricot-colored room
with the silhouette of an African tree
above the desk.

Church bells next door.
A baking house across the street.
Many women arrive with balls of dough,
marked by a symbol of ownership.
Man in blue
hacks wood for the stone oven,
with two front teeth missing.

Orderly bookshelves and an heirloom rug,
too expensive to throw away,
too ugly for the main house.

We had tongued each other for weeks,
then laid down on the quilt
mom had made for my 21st birthday.
He moved on top of me,
as I searched for feelings.
Am I a woman now?

On his white T-shirt,
a blond Viking smiled confidently at me.
His halo read:
“Virgin maidens register here.”
Is it allowed to laugh during sex?

Sex was so serious that my mother's eyes
always looked wounded
when she came out of her bedroom,
bravely resuming her chores.
My stepfather appeared shortly thereafter,
adjusting his leather belt
in a triumphant gesture.

I run into the kitchen
looking into my mother's gray eyes.
I must look different.
She has to notice.
I am a woman now.

In the Hills of Yugoslavia

I met my father for the first time in 1998, after having imagined him my entire life. I was 36 years old. My body knew him immediately. His laughter, vanity, and gait were eerily familiar. I have not seen him since.


His gait and strong, vital belly
welcome me into his world,
checkered shirt flapping.
He laughs with his goats,
and mocks old grandmother in black,
tiny as a shrunken bird.

She chills the milk
in the light of dusk,
swooping the ladle up and down.
Chin resting in her palm,
she watches the white liquid
that has been with her all her life.

On the second day
he slaughters “Milosevic.”
Her goat guts are spilling out of the branches
she hangs from.

In the evening I eat her flesh
with cheese, homemade and
white as a virgin,
tomatoes,
red as first blood,
and cucumbers,
green as Eden.

My father and I
have known one another
for four days.