VUKOVAR’S GHOSTS

by Alessandro Manzetti and Marge Simon

November 20, 1991

If you’re looking for ghosts,

just raise your eyes

towards the rusty top

of this water tower;

we’re all there, sitting

around invisible tables

of an abandoned restaurant

floating above the city

and the red dust

which shows, intermittently,

the bunch of Arkan’s tigers

with their all black stripes.

First, they came for our women—

we even knew some of them,

and screamed out their names

to tone deaf ears and feral eyes.

They took our daughters,

then mothers the same, making all watch,

over and over until they were tired,

blood from between so many legs

staining the pavements

in an unholy menstruation.

Among the living is a woman

who testifies how she asked her husband to leave,

but he would not go, though he knew

what had been done to her,

scarring her soul as it had her body,

emptying her of passion,

useless as our water tower.

In front of our mouths

there is a dish of grenades

with a side of back bacon,

gunpowder and fresh memories

just juiced from hundred of heads.

—so clear and exquisite—

You can join us,

we’re drinking bourbon

distilled from boiled blood

and we’re still waiting for the dessert,

tha armistice, the silence

and a fat sunset.

We are all twins, born at the same time

in the Ovčara farm

six miles away from here,

into shouting’s storage hangars,

thanks to a bullet in the head

rabid, rapid, cold as the mud

which is watertight in the ditches,

all round, where the frogs sing

the Death March,

giving the illusion of being in a dream,

perhaps in a forest in Madagascar,

—all those camouflage suits—

—and the choir of the amphibians—

and still be alive, definitely,

with a loaf of bread between the teeth

instead of a tongue frozen by fear.

Join us as we toast

the living and the dead

with our special bourbon,

floating high above the city

and the red, red dust.