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  • Would It Surprise You I Don’t Like Mornings?, and: The First Time, and: Wafer-Like and White, and: In the Absence of Grass, and: Sarajevo Cycle: 1992 to 1996, and: Cinema Verité: A Love Story
  • Andrea O’Rourke (bio)

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  • Would It Surprise You I Don’t Like Mornings?
  • Andrea O’Rourke

How bright the bombs must have looked as the dawn stretched thin across the hills, shrapnel sleeting on the terracotta roofs.

For another sixty years, every time she’d step out of her bungalow, she’d face the monument— ten yards ahead the shell of her old house now storage: trunks of fabrics, potatoes sprouting in mesh bags, the stink of drying prosciutto, pigs’ feet. I like to think she’d always turn left to the solid stone well, 1902 chiseled on its base, planters rusting (pomodori pelati cans), the screen of blue grape vines taut like boat ropes overgrown with moss. I remember my aunts grumbling under that shade and to the right, in bell-bottoms, my uncle slouching in a plastic chair— long sideburns, the sheen of scissors in Mom’s hands and the graying tufts falling on grass like ashes. I remember Mom’s cheeks being higher than the hills, Nona’s breasts pulled and vein-ridden like grapeskin, and Nono singing and twirling with Linda, his dog. No one spoke about the ruin, no one mentioned her two boys found in the woods, slaughtered with partisans, their oldest brother sniped while passing a window in his room at the general hospital. No one remembered her first husband’s name, or the name of the neighbor who called him out at 5 a.m., then returned two hours later for coffee and grappa she had to offer, her Italian husband prostrate in a grove, executed with other suspected Fascists. No one talked about how that was the house Germans bombed and how that morning the shadows must have been audible moments before the planes— Jesus clamoring on the cross above the front door, the tremor like no other, the dust. Perhaps a cry. Nona thrown under her Singer sewing machine, [End Page 168] its treadle in perpetual up-down, the fabric slipping and the baby, another boy, crushed by the roof beams. Then the silence.

  Like our secrecy. They say joy is a choice but no one mentions victims. So, hushed it stays. Back home you spread, almost asleep. I make here there, glide over your forbidden back and lip the scar under your ear. We do this each night, never let the daylight see it. Victims ruin it. [End Page 169]

  • The First Time
  • Andrea O’Rourke

The smoke bathes my throat like a warm frost-shadow. Borut, the red-faced Slovene, grins hard, the capillaries of his wade-blue eyes burst like bottle rockets, or like the peonies around his homegrown pot. Local semirebels surround him now, safety pins and crosses dangle off their earlobes, the bucktoothed boy lingers midsentence, someone laughs, and I wonder if it’s Borut’s face or my age that’s amusing. I laugh because they seem happy, huddled here under the lighthouse’s blinking eye as boats bob, slosh off the island. The tape player spools out the Clash, the Dead Kennedys until our voices double back around the pier and our talk loosens into silence: slow, clumsy and plum with finale.

  Below, the village sleeps like a giant gray baby, and the third-shift waiters have cleared the patios. As I trod to my square house—each footfall softer—Jugo drags the Adriatic to the shore with no noise, the salty frothless pool around my ankles, and my tween legs like two long masts on a boat. [End Page 170]

  • Wafer-Like and White
  • Andrea O’Rourke

It’s a self-defeating act, writing the 100-word bio, but what about the footnotes? How my dad’s bones decay to chalk outside the curved palm of Kvarner Bay, and how its forefinger still motions, lures back? ’92, the year before he died on the last...

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