accented in gold

It's a two-poem day! This is because yesterday was so absolutely jam-packed that I wasn't at my computer at all. We moved from the airport hotel at LGA to the hotel we're staying at in Manhattan, went to brunch, went to look at cherry blossoms in Central Park, and went to see Wicked. (Which was wonderful! It was Lucy's first time seeing the stage play and I hadn't seen it in like 20 years.) Then we went back to the hotel and Lucy ordered take-out and crashed and I went to dinner with friends and then walked most of the way back to the hotel like an idiot who hasn't lived in New York in over a year and is paying for this with very sore feet and legs today.

Anyway, I kept thinking about this poem while we were walking through Central Park, so here's Ana Božičević for April 9:

Everyone shivering in their
Leather jackets
Eating sandwiches named after
Serial killers
And in the middle of
All of it
Magnolia trees
Enough to make you
Stop and say

Fuck!

Super tenderly.

—Ana Božičević, "Spring 2," published in the NY Tyrant, July 5, 2018.

*

Today's poem is also a little for New York, of course. I really love this poem, and it was always going to be one of the first ones I posted for this week:

for Erika

i ask you what's the first thing you think about
when you see the color yellow & like a real
new yorker, you say yellow cabs. not sunlight
or a yellow ribbon tied around a vase of fresh begonias.
yellow cabs honking down Broadway. i still remember
the night we first shared a cab. you whispered
honey, whispered lace, whispered chrysanthemum.
all that practice & it turns out, i had never ridden
in a cab the right way around us the streetlights blurred
into yellow ribbons, & when you put your hand
on my thigh it was like i knew for the first time
why god gave us thighs. why god gave us hands.
maybe god invented yellow for the cabs,
so the first time we touched like this
it could be accented in gold.

—José Olivarez, "Love Poem Beginning with a Yellow Cab," from Promises of Gold (Macmillan, 2023).

why we shake

I read my first Ana Božičević poem in 2017, when I was in briefly in Croatia on a Mediterranean cruise with my parents and mistresscurvy, and was looking for Croatian poets. Her poetry has a kind of bite to it that I really love, and I've had this one on my list to post this year.

Eloquent
Silence of everyone I ever loved
This cloudy Friday evening
Spring but still cold
A smattering of new buds
Who's that
Swaddled in
The uneasy atmosphere
In silence
No chatter or pleasant surprise
The lusty rush of a weekend
With the beloved
Who's that
Sprouting now out of
The cottony silence
With silky whips
Still hanging from their little chops
Who is it straining
To pop out
Of the hardwood
Rings of time
Into the cool air
Like there's another cool world
On the other side of this one
Worth pushing
Through to or maybe
We're already there
Is that
Why we shake

—Ana Božičević (b. 1977), "Who's That," PoetryNow, 2017.

art my way back

I went looking for contemporary poets from Croatia, ideally writing in English, and found Ana Božičević. Her poetry is weird and layered and very contemporary and not always entirely to my taste, but I also really like it; I especially like this one, which was a Poem-a-Day at the Academy of American Poets on November 26, 2013. I think my favorite thing about this poem is the enjambment and the accompanying punctuation, which is completely killer.

Skinny dirt road
In the middle of the ocean.
That led to the house of art.
I took it. The engine nearly
Drowned. I lied that it was fun
That I’d do it again. When I got to
That shore
The house was gone and when
I looked back, so was the path.
Now I’m old. Drown in my bed
A thousand miles inland.
For years I thought
I could
Art my way back. Cats sing
Of rose dawns. This country’s a
Mirror image
Of the one I left, except
I’ve bad dreams. And
You’re the only
Person who’s not here.
Is it the same
For you.

—Ana Božičević (b. 1977), "Joyride," 2013.