Homecoming

by

Adnan Mahmutovic

 

 

Part 1: Bout of Nostalgia and Strangeness

In the spring of 2004, exactly eleven years after my arrival to Sweden, I was overjoyed by having received a scholarship to write a PhD in English literature, and decided it was about time to venture on a sightseeing of my birth city, Banja Luka. According to the international agreements for the return of refugees, my house had a year earlier been emptied of its occupants. I drove 2,500 km one-way through Europe, crossed the miles-long bridge to the no-longer-rotten Denmark, drove like a maniac on Germany’s Autobahn, and navigated through Austria’s heavy mountain shadows.

I was amazed to see the Bosnian word for “toilet” appear on huge Slovenian road signs (because in Slovenian it meant “west”). As I winded my way at snail-speed along Croatian roads just inches from huge precipices with dozens of angry Croatian drivers having a hard time overtaking me because of the meeting of cars on the ledge. Then I entered Bosnia at a place I’d never seen before, and traveled for a hundred more miles through towns and villages I vaguely recalled from geography lectures, before coming to the small familiar place called motherland, my city, my suburb.

Before the journey, I was warned about many things: the bad Balkan roads, the madness of (other) peoples’ driving habits, where to drive slower so as not to get fined, where to say what, to whom and how much is reasonable to pay to pass along as smoothly as possible.

A trip like that—for the first time, with two kids in the backseat—is a bit scary, especially when different people tell you different things. Bosnian passports had kept changing every couple of years and were still rumored to cause longer stops and other impediments, whereas the Swedish ones you could just wave at border crossings. I applied for one. I was prepared.

I entered my country, then my house. Hardly recognized anything. My yard was overgrown with chamomile. It was a hot evening and it was like being inside the fumes of freshly brewed tea. Everything felt real like a good steady dream, a dream that does not leave you when you wake. Next day, I walked around the neighborhood. Unrecognizable faces moved like bodiless masks around familiar houses. Some of the homes were completely empty; as mine would be once I went back (home) to Sweden. It was nice and ghostly to be there again.

One thing astounded me more than anything else. Once I got back to my birthplace, I knew I was supposed to register with the police, because I was using a foreign passport. But somehow it sounded so ridiculous, I took it lightly and mixed with the feelings of seeing my (ex-) home, I was too overwhelmed. Meeting some of my returning old neighbors who scolded me for not relocating to my roots for good, made me numb. I could not even think of how my two small boys were stomaching everything. All I knew was they were not causing much trouble.

Just before returning to Sweden, I was warned again to register and un-register. I went to the police and the sulky clerk asked me why I had not done it earlier. I shrugged my shoulders and told him I was not sure I was supposed to. He retorted, “You who live abroad just stream back in this country every damn summer. You feel you’re coming back home and that everything is just hunky-dory. But you don’t get that you’re foreigners now. You’re strangers.”

I envisioned myself as all the poetic puppets in Cohen’s Stranger Song. I could see Melville using me as the model for his con man who claims honesty, a man “in the extremist sense of the word, a stranger.” I thought of my fictional character Almasa then, and heard the uncanny voice of Dylan Thomas coming from an old LP, “A stranger has come / To share my room in the house not right in the head, / A girl mad as birds.”

 

 

It dawned on me—the feelings of strangeness, the mangy smell of uprooted-ness cannot be erased from the nouveau Swedes. I finally understood what the word stranger meant at its very core. My own being was open to me like an imploding structure. I cannot say that I was foreign to this sentiment before, only now I knew how to accept it and relate to it.

I even found myself crying to Dino Merlin’s sentimental song that made tears flood the Diaspora, “Can a bird find its nest? Can a refugee find a home?” I used to hate those hackneyed metaphors, yet that moment they offered the clearest picture of the endeavor to crawl back into some mother-cave.

My home was, if anything, my strangeness.

Part 2: Mother Tongue

Another thing made me realize how estranged I was from Bosnia: the language. I hadn’t forgotten it. To the contrary, I was something of a mother tongue fanatic, a nativist struggling to preserve this rich heritage of words that even Goethe himself learnt so as to enjoy Bosnian poetry. Well, it was not poetry I had forgotten about, it was the excessive Bosnian swearing. Bosnians sometimes pride themselves on the flexibility of their language. All words can be used for invective. We even have special suffixes that make this possible.

This is what happened. My mom-in-law wanted to buy a whole grilled lamb for her nephew’s wedding. The groom and I went to fetch one from this man who had a BBQ place. While the toothless man served us cool Fanta Mango and boasted about his business, his skinny wife was inside the overheated fumy room, chopping the lamb to pieces and throwing me some smiles whenever I gawked at her huge, hatchet-looking knife, which she whetted now and then.

I was absolutely speechless in the man’s company. I was confused by his language, so I let the groom do the talking. The problem was the man used a deluge of invectives. He swore like mad, but he was not angry or unpleasant. To the contrary, he was quite cheerful and pleasant. I had forgotten about Bosnian casual-language-tactics. In order to make his language less posh, to make it as casual and relaxed as possible, he stuffed his sentences with ugly words, while his wife stuffed bags with chopped lamb.

My intention is not to relish the foul language, but I feel I want to try and recreate one topic in which the man was engaged. I will try to translate as literally as possible, even though the curses will not seem idiomatic in English. The topic was breakfast. It took the man five minutes to say, “I woke up early this morning and went to the baker, Midhat. I bought three buns and a cup of ajran (sour milk), and I sat in the grass to enjoy my breakfast.” This was my translation. He said something like: “So I fucking woke up, a motherfucking hour before the cocksucking rooster. And I felt, fuck its mother in the ass, what can I fucking do now? Fuck it. So I washed my bloody face, and waddled down the sister-fucking road to that cocksucker Midhat, who makes cunt-smelly buns, and I fucking bought three, fuck his mom in the…and I sat in the grass to fucking rest, and enjoy the cocksucking breakfast, before I had to go to the motherfucking, hell of a job.” Something like that; you get the gist.

I felt like a Puritan. I had stopped using even the regular “fuck it” in each sentence, let alone this system: only-every-second-word-normal. I was a stranger again, a posh Swede (the Swedish being famous for having few and quite innocuous invectives). Yet, not even Swedes are so posh. When they ask me to teach them a few words from my mother tongue, they always ask for invectives. Shakespeare’s Caliban said he was thankful to Miranda for she taught him how to curse and he could curse Prospero for his misfortune. This made me wonder how in the world does a man forget to curse?

Back in the safe corridors of the English department in Stockholm, a linguist colleague tells me even babies are exposed to their mother tongues in the womb. It is an uncanny thing: swimming in a language like in the amniotic fluid, then swimming out of it like out of ice-cold Scandinavian sea onto some unfamiliar shore, breathless, and quite speechless. Quite curse-less.

 

 

Adnan Mahmutovic works as a Ph.D. student of English literature in Stockholm. He is a member of PEN. He has written academic articles, essays, and a collection of stories entitled [REFUGE]E. His novella Fatima: A Memoir has been published as an e-book with Cantarabooks.

 

Bosnia courtesy Art.com

Twice the Man

by

S. V. Patrick

 

 

Billy Moss was doing seventy on a North Carolina byway, thinking about the sun shining on Sally Hill’s backside. Earlier that day Billy had seen the tattoo blaze as Sally arched her lower back, working the pains of a long ride out of her bones. Because Billy had been riding his Harley just a little ways from Sally during her full-on cat stretch, he got a birds-eye view of the very bottom rays of that dark green sun that went way, way down her black leather pants.

Problem was, Billy was thinking so hard about the luck of that sunshine, he took too long to register the slow moving Chevy that swerved into the lane right in front of him. Consequently, Billy went from full throttle to full brake and his bike flipped, then landed and slid, with his right leg under it, one hundred feet before stopping just shy of a concrete embankment.

The crash flattened the bottom of Billy’s leg like a bag of crushed ice. So much so, the doctors included the knee and everything below it in an amputation that night. Billy woke up the next morning screaming. “What kind of a man,” yelled Billy, “is a man with one leg?” 

Sally, the fastest girl in the Asheville Motorcycle Club, didn’t know or care. Like a spoiled kid mounting all the animals on a carousel, Sally was so busy jumping from ride to ride she hardly noticed poor Billy wasn’t hanging at the club’s rallies anymore. Matter of fact, Sally, who noticed most every man on a bike, because no one satisfied her for long, never took to Billy. He was young and full of cum and all, but Sally, who’d been there, done that, lusted after more than what a kid just out of high school could offer.

Most members of the Asheville Motorcycle Club, who were, after all, all men, appreciated Sally’s adventurousness. If some envy was felt when Sally moved her shit to somebody else’s saddle bags, telling everyone Sally was once again riding elsewhere, much solace was found in that her shit was sure to move somewhere else soon.

The longest Sally stayed with anyone was when she met Brad and Brent Bonds, twins from Canton who rode one behind the other on their big fat hog. The day they bagged Sally, the brothers worried they were going to have to buy a side car. But spirited Sally, never one to shy from something new, slipped between those boys just like she did at night.

After three weeks with the twins, some folks thought Sally had finally found something that satisfied her. But after Brad and Brent started bitching like two old ladies, mostly on account of her, Sally switched bikes again, this time moving to seasoned Steve Horn.

The choice of scarred up old Horn surprised some but when the bitter Bonds boys grumbled about how Steve reminded Sally of her old man, who’d been banged up bad in an industrial accident way back when, Sally’s selection made more sense. Fact was, it was Sally’s fear of turning into her momma, who’d wasted her youth in a dark trailer channel surfing for Sally’s daddy, that drove Sally to the road to begin with. Last thing Sally could imagine was flipping the channels all day for a man who’d so lost his lust for life he couldn’t even find Monday night football.

 

 

Steve was who Sally was with the day one-legged Billy decided to fuck all, get back on his Harley, and ride, solo, the 450 miles from Asheville, North Carolina to the Scottish Highlands Games in Jacksonville, Florida.

Having to choose between dying like a cripple or living like a rebel, Billy chose the latter. Since Billy’s own daddy was off in Iraq, trying to figure out what to shoot and why, Billy reached out to his fighting Scottish ancestors for help. Donning a black and red kilt with nothing underneath but a badass tattoo of his family crest, Billy averaged eighty-five the first half of the trip, topped over one hundred the second, and made it to Jacksonville in a respectable five hours.

Had Sally not wanted to have sex under the stars with Steve so much, she’d have made it to Jacksonville the night before and never made it to the games in time to see Billy cruise into the Clay County Fairgrounds like the newly-bronzed god he’d become. Baked brown in the Florida sun, shirtless, pumped up Billy breezed by Sally like she was nobody, certainly not the sexiest cycle slut his motorcycle club had ever had.

But what grabbed hold of Sally, what made her stop in her tracks and scream louder than she had on the craziest of nights, was what jutted out below Billy’s tartan. For there, rising up boldly like they were ready to fight, were two of the hottest pieces of flesh she'd seen in a long time. With no right leg to balance out the left, Billy's member, during that long ride down to Florida, had sidled right over to what was left over there. And what with the wind, the sun, the sweat, and Billy’s youth and all, Billy had risen to the occasion as he’d entered the Highlands Games so much so that his member, which fell all the way down to where his right knee would have been, and the nub of his right leg, looked like a pair of tall, matching flag poles that needed nothing but something, or someone, to proudly fly on top.

As Sally caught her breath, she screamed out “Billy!” and ran like she’d never run after a member of the Asheville Motorcycle Club before. For Sally had done a lot of things in her short wild life but nothing could compare to what she imagined she could do with Billy who was, after all, twice the man he’d ever been.

 

 

S.V. Patrick lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C. where he works as a journalist.  His fiction also can be found in Ghoti and Skive Magazine. 

Woman Looking at Motorcycle courtesy Art.com

Blogging Evolution

by

Bren Gentry

Suppose that to enter a blog
you must first sit lotus
on a porch swing

with an octopus wrapped
around your neck waiting
for the wizard to edit a door.

It's all about me, you'd say
as you watch for feet to walk
and hands to knock.
The bell wouldn't ring,

because it was disconnected
from the blank side of your face
which controlled lips that swell
on the common side

and keep flapping about why
good things happen
to bad people or bad things happen
to good people.

Until you realize that all the sea
people want is the salted half of your brain.

 

Bren Gentry lives on a farm in the Midwest with her husband, daughter, and grandson. She has been published in Amaze: the Cinquain Journal, Women of The Web Anthology, Wild Poets, Tryst, and Niederngasse. Bren runs Pen Shells poetry board online.

Installed

by

Jon Borcherding

You stand still on a well-lit stage.
I sprinkle salt on your shadow,
a wound in the light,
where it strikes the floor.
You walk away tomorrow.
The shadow does not heal;
it winces on the boards.
Salt sings in the marrow.

 

Jon Borcherding has penned pop lyrics for ephemeral idols of the Scandinavian rock scene, worked as a boat builder, bartender, and carpenter.  He currently lives in Tacoma, WA, with his wife, his dog, and a ridiculous number of acoustic guitars and small watercraft. Check out his blog, Wordswamps.

Housekeeping Tips for the Single Hermit

by

Zoë Gabriel

You scurry to get things done,
polish the details,
finish the wood, veneer the rituals
of afternoon coffee and morning
lying in wait for the mailman.
All the time that you find
hope and strength in the narrow places,
the mustard seeds and hidden crevasses,
you know that the key
is not to long and, especially,
not to pine. Those are killers,
the ultraviolet rays that burn you to cinders
and melt the ice float
you’ve set up housekeeping on,
your heart both impregnable tower and dry rot.

Zoë Gabriel’s poems have appeared in Oysters & Chocolate, Tales of the Talisman, Illumen, Word Riot, The Commonline Project, Thieves Jargon, GlassFire Magazine, Grasslimb, Centrifugal Eye, Poetry Midwest, Southern Ocean Review, Salt River Review, Locust Magazine, Unlikely Stories, AntiMuse, and Cadenza; she has work forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, Tales of the Unanticipated, and Weird Tales. Zoë dyes her hair, but is naturally tall. She loves books, languages, spicy food and colorful socks. She is from Europe and lives in Maryland.

Letting Go

by

Steve Meador

We had two pups, Scout and Butch,
out of a blue tick bitch named Tip.
She had been topped by a neighbor's black and tan,
which hadn't been neutered by the coon after all.
Butch once clung to a pheasant's foot,
was drug across 20 feet of thistle
before letting go.
Scout seemed a little slow,
watched the spectacle
then sniffed out a small rabbit,
pinned it with his front paws
and pulled off nearly every strand of fur,
before letting go.
The rabbit's tissue-soft skin flushed purple,
like ironweed stem, as it wobbled into the weeds.
I thought about it years later, my sleep suffered
from the things that country kids remember,
before letting go.

 

Steve Meador's book Throwing Percy from the Cherry Tree, released byD-N Publishing in 2008, has been nominated for several awards, including a National Book Award and a Pulitzer. His poetry has appeared in Stirring, Umbrella, Blue Fifth Review, Word Riot, Mipoesias, and many others. He has multiple Pushcart nominations. Find him at: www.hangingmossjournal.com.

Twenty Shoes

by

Brigita Pavsic

Ten pairs later I still
wonder whether I really know you.
It was easier when our only
worry was to ditch lessons and try
to avoid responsibility, when we lived
off toast and watery tea and a bottle
of cheap wine every now and then
that helped us forget or remember
I don't know which, when you promised
to make me happy and didn't know
what that entailed, when I smiled
and believed in “forever.”
Ten pairs later I still
don't know whether forever ends,
whether you're the only one that can
make me happy, or if I can return
the favor. Twenty laces that still –
some more firmly than others –
tie us together, smelly, discolored,
frayed in places, but sturdy.
Each year a new pair.