Bosnia is a land that forces you to inherit its unresolved violence. It asks you to metabolize a
history that isn’t yours, even as your own tongue is carved into a singular identity.
I suck marrow from lamb bones, fat congealing
like trauma on the plate. Ma texts eat enough warmth
but my stomach knots around kajmak. I bite, gag
ash from ‘92— Višegrad’s drowned lovers swirl the plum jam.
In the market, a woman sells embroidered sorrows,
her eyes two shuttered storefronts. Chechnya’s tears,
Srebrenica’s lace. She mistakes my silence for commerce,
thrusts a pomegranate, split like a heart mid-autopsy.
Seeds bleed down my wrist: Mother’s hands unspooling Canton
lychees at home. Flesh is all we keep, she’d hum, while the hills shrug
off their birch tree wigs. The river mirrors
the sky’s leaden psalm, water knowing the weight of bones.
At dusk, the cathedral’s teeth chew the muezzin’s
cry to pulp. Last night, I Googled
how to disappear in three scripts. The Vrbas answered:
drag your shadow through its copper current till it bleeds rust.
Beneath Stari Most, a Roma girl reads my palm—
lines like minefields, she hisses, you walk but never arrive.
Boys lob chingchangchong like grenades, laugh when I flinch.
My tongue, a defected diplomat, mangles izvinite.
The clinic nurse probes my spleen, asks if all Asians smell of
soy and surrender. I cough up phlegm, chartreuse maggots in
No Man’s Land. You left your jastuk dent in my sheets, a fossil of
our maybe-love. Chamomile petals bloat like
corpse-fingers in your chipped mug. Volim te, you slurred rakija-rot
breath, your palms mapping Sarajevo’s bullet-hive honeycombing
my hips. Your mouth a checkpoint strip searching my consonants.
Dawn bleeds through Ottoman blinds. I tally
my ribs—eleven stitches suturing a mass grave’s yawn.
Somewhere, a landmine dreams of motherhood.
Somewhere, my ancestors burn joss sticks to gods
deaf to Cyrillic’s threnody. I peel a mandarin, its segments
glistening—viscera of a country I can’t swallow, can’t spit.