if someone has flushed the alphabet away

in belgrade, boy approaches basket, pretending it is a horse

16 9 2010


Could be anywhere today



But still, there is the sheen of the glass ashtray. There is the liquid-black of the unused straw. The middle-aged woman swinging her arm like military while staring at the ground and plodding over the stones. There is the obligatory old man in a beige jacket and khaki pants- his posture is such that his chin is level with his shoulders.

We hear a barking laugh that sounds like an aggressive, feigned hilarity. A baby in an orange and black stroller, bumping over the cobblestones. He has deep-black hair, sits fully upright, and looks to his left, to where we sit. More than looks, he is glaring; his brow is furrowed and his faint eyebrows are fully tensed.





15 9 2010



Went back to the galeriile fortuna café. Same table today. Same angle. Later in the day today, though, but, and, the light is lighting up the wall of the old church and it has become a glowing cobalt, and over here, some group of Swiss students has sat down. One of them is a girl with the face of an angry boy, and she keeps glaring and looking scornfully at the currency here, the Lei, as the others produce wallets, dig in purses, and actually, they are all girls at that table, except for one boy who is small and Indonesian looking.

And I see the entrance to a sewer, and there are little raised ‘U’s’ on the thing. Little ones and big ones, spiraling out from the center. As if someone has flushed the alphabet away, and the letter U went careening into the sewer cover causing raised u's for the pedestrians to negotiate.

One of the students eats a white coconut or maybe white chocolate thing, looks almost like dead skin, and I hear it crunch, and it is most likely not the skin of a corpse that she has been drying for months and is now eating in public, feeling secure that the others are fooled by the chips bag that her harvest has been slyly deposited into, right.

Right, and today, I walked through the cemetery again, and I sat down and happened upon some teeth in the ground. I dug with rocks and pulled out an old set of ceramic false teeth. I used two sticks as if they were tongs, to lift the teeth, thinking at the time that maybe they were haunted, and I placed the teeth in a tree.