war still raging. just on my block.

As seen in Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s 2020 Gold Circle Awards First Place Winner for Open (Free) Form Poetry in the City of New York

i am standing in the middle of a museum and my parents,
in a corner,
are crying.

i am trying not to notice the photos of the headless bodies on the walls, the blood pooling around a winter coat and a bag groceries,
two dead hands intertwined beneath a white sheet
that doubled down as a funeral.

they threw grenades in marketplaces
so they could kill the most people at once,
mortar shells cutting limbs like lumber.
my throat is dry and i feel like i’m going to faint.
there are no chairs for the people who can’t stomach blood. mama tells me,
vidi kako rat pokaze najgoru stranu ljudskog lica
-look how war shows the worst side of humanity’s face- and tata looks at the photos longer,
as if it takes one look to snap him back 20 years.
i am not a fan of the museums so I’ve learned
to find the restaurant quick,
but here
there is no food,
no postcards or refrigerator magnets
here, there is a front desk lady and her friend.
here, there are photos of the dead.
the rest of the world calls it a war museum
but here, they don’t call it.

tata was a refugee.
which means he ran fast,
ran through four countries off of a letter he mailed
from zagreb to america.
addressing it to a man he met once in the 1984 sarajevo olympics. who called his camp and got him a visa.
kind of like willy wonka’s golden ticket.
but there are too many people whose long shots ran short;
mother was killed on an intersection,

her body sat for a week through non-stop sniper tread. my great uncle was put in concentration camp.
drank his own urine to survive
for months and months at a time.

and at some point war stops to rhyme.
becomes a trip back to bosnia,
harvesting forever young memories,
finding a piano in your childhood condo.
polka dots stained by daily sniper shots on its ebony and the notes are jacked to a new key

of bombs ringing in the street. It’s just a melody of
gun powered caked music sheets.

i read mama my first draft of this poem.
and she says,
the tears were never about the blood in sidewalk cracks. it was a chess club card found in a wallet.

a child’s fort made in the basement,
who learned to tuned their ears to a war roaring outdoors. and perhaps the war will never leave the bullet holes in bosnian buildings my cousins and I have
learned to ignore on the bustling streets

Oh, Sarajevo. How i wish you knew that
war is not a poem or a metaphor.
war is the grenade shells imprinted into your ground, filled with red paint
and named
sarajevske ruže
-sarajevo’s roses-
war is the animalistic desire to live all refugees share
war is the american dream my dad found
on the plane ride over.
tucked it under the seat back pocket,
and browsed through the airlines magazine
for a suburban home with a two car garage.
war is the ICE truck at the end of our street just last week, waiting to deport the parents of dreamers.

who, in another world where my dad wasn’t granted a visa, or the sarajevo olympics never happened,
could have so easily been me.
war is not having the time to tell everyone’s stories,

so you’re trying to fit them into a museum, where my parents,
in a corner,
are crying.