“MY FATHER TELLS ME ABOUT THE YUGOSLAVIAN CIVIL WAR” by Tea Gerbeza

August 27, 2024

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “MY FATHER TELLS ME ABOUT THE YUGOSLAVIAN CIVIL WAR” by Tea Gebeza. Due to its formatting, this poem is only available as an image.

MY FATHER TELLS ME ABOUT THE YUGOSLAVIAN CIVIL WAR

By Tea Gerbeza

On the eve of my eighteenth birthday I find my father in our garage sitting on the browned couch with his right palm beside him mid-tap, an invitation for someone to join but no one is here & he’s stuck like that, wading through a crowd of ghosts until I sit across from him. He rises tries to cure my broken teenage heart with a midnight barbeque. Look, he says, the moon is a balloon for you tonight. He tells me ghosts are pictures in his head & we must give in to the ongoingness, the way our past decides our rituals. Was his always this? Seated at the couch, knees pressed into the plywood coffee table & a half-filled shot of plum brandy grasped between fingertips discoloured from years of smoking. Do his ghosts blame him for surviving? With a shot of my own, we raise spirit to sky, beckon a caesura punctuated by slow sips. My father tells me about the war: I was lying in the dirt & a sniper’s bullet shot right above my head. ZOOM, my hair stood up like this. He moves his hand fast through his buzz cut. Tries to make these memories liquid so he can live with them & not wake my mother each night with his screams. I kissed the ground, nowhere deeper I could go. You know, when you were little you used to come into my room wake me from my nightmare with your small hand over my heart saying ‘Daddy, daddy sta je bilo?’— The charred chicken reminds him why we’re out here. To cheer me up, he pulls a poem I wrote from his wallet, reads it aloud, enacts his mispronunciations with movements to prove he knows what each word means. Heh-si-tat, he puffs his chest like a bird, means it stops. The lacuna that opens in the slip of it instead of I unmoors him. I reach for his chest, place my palm over his heart, invite his ghosts to wrest in me.

Previously published in Action, Spectacle.

Tea Gerbeza (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and multimedia artist. She has an MFA in Writing (University of Saskatchewan) and an MA in English & Creative Writing (University of Regina). Most recently, she won the Ex-Puritan’s 2022 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry. She also made the longlist for Room magazine’s 2022 Short Forms contest. New work appears in ARC magazine, Action, Spectacle, The Poetry Foundation, Wordgathering, and Contemporary Verse 2. Tea’s debut poetry book, How I Bend Into More, is forthcoming in spring 2025 with Palimpsest Press.

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