Great-Uncle Stefan wears the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s sailor suit,
its cap flat and black, his long
dark hair pomaded in a stiff
blunt skirt behind his neck.
There’s something about the nose’s
bulb-and-nostril conglomeration that we share,
and though I’m not a man I like to think
I am a sailor, with a waxed moustache like his
whose curled-up ends provide
an occupation for our nervous hands,
twirling it so as not to betray
with a squint or smirk his sympathies,
which lie with the murderer Princip.
Who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, where
it took me a long time in the assassination museum,
reading Cyrillic via the osmotic method
of translation, before I figured out
Princip was the hero of the place: a person
could match her feet with his imprinted
in the sidewalk and pull the trigger of her fingers.
And enter the fantasy of being The One Who Caused
The Greater Past, which I could not resist:
my knuckle crooked, and clicked.
However I did spare the Duchess Sophie.