BON MARCHÉ

"I'm on my year abroad in Paris and opted for this visual pun on the title: the French term "bon marché" (from "marché" meaning marketplace) suggests a cheap buy/ bargain. It was a Saturday, market day; the second-hand friperie stores packed with people hunting down a good buy."

submitted by Jake Alden-Falconer

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COCKTAILS

A slice of lemon is sharpening up the sky                                                             Against the clouds of purple and a husky wind;                                                   A dusty sunset coughs, and soothes its throat.

Your footsteps ring on the curve of the glass                                                       As you wind your spiralled way around its stem -                                           The cool translucence honed with citrus trills.

A knock against the door, a low-voiced laugh,                                             Knees that fold to the floor like a staircase falling.                                       Purple washes us, burnishes new hours for morning.

The world spins round like a wineglass or                                                           A lemon rolled to the foot of the stairs;                                                           The purple pales and drifts away from sunset's snares.

submitted by Rina Keefe

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A FAMILY PORTRAIT

A Family Portrait

I pack my things in the big suitcase. Mara comes from behind and brings clean towels and puts them among my clothes. She stands next to me bending over the suitcase, head down. I see her reflection in the cupboard.

-Maybe in Iraq they don’t use towels like this-she speaks in Vlach.

 The window’s open. I hear our kids playing on the street and a man selling wooden earrings. I see, in the window frame, a small root growing into the room. Vanga’s head shows in the window frame with the bruised left eye and she shouts from the cobbled street:

-Poppa, poppa, the gypsies took Lydia.

Mara folds the old weaved rag, flashy green, peach pink, purple, blue, grey and orange, she made when she was around seven months pregnant with Lyda. Lyda looks like the neighbour’s girl I played with when I was nine, pale and brown haired. I hear Vanga’s footsteps in the garish sandals I bought her at Skopje’s old bazaar, which Lyde will wear in a few years.

            Vanga changes her mind and stops at the wooden stair where Mite hides his cigarette stash. Mara takes an old black and white photo of us all taken at Stone Bridge the year we lost Kiraza. She points with her index finger at the left upper corner of the photo, Lyda pick-pocketing a lady whose face hadn’t fit into the camera’s scope. Then, Mara nods, eyes beyond the photo, pointing at the old cupboard where white linen and lace stick out from the closed lower door and she says:

-Mutra mini

She closes the suitcase and sticks the old photo in her robe as I lean over the window and take a whiff of the smoke of Vanga’s already put out cigarette. I will quit if tumour quits me. If they quit, those gypsy kids Mara used to talk to in some mix of Gypsy and Turkish when they lived under the bridge and bathed in Vardar. When the bridge was. They say, Skopje bridges are, even when they had been. There was this Jewish bridge where I watched for fish or looked at Kale with Lyda’s double. Yes, Lyda’s double would stop passers-by in hats to beg for a denar or two as a pass to the Kale fortress. Then, she checked if they were real and threw them into Vardar.

That stupid kiddo will suffocate inside. At the ceiling, there’s a nightingale and a nest. Not even an earthquake will wake those two.

There is Mara cleaning the yard at midnight again. She plants lindens and Japanese apples. Old Mara.

Vanga enters the room.

-Poppa, poppa  your rotten son Mite killed the nightingale’s baby.

I look at her red hair and see a grey feather. I don’t tell her.     

-Poppa, poppa, don’t you listen, the gypsies took Lydia. Poppa, grandma painted a cross on her forehead. Poppa, look what Mite did to my eye.

She slaps me on the face.

-Poppa, why did you tell me Gorky was a communist?

She takes off the garish sandals and throws them through the window across my head. They fly and fall in the garden. Somehow, Mara thinks a miracle will happen next year.

She buries them into the soil. She stomps against the stairs.  I hear her stop. On the fifth step where Vanga hides her romance novels stash in front of the painting of Islahana park. The park that was. All the parks in Skopje are, even if they had been. Even if you hadn’t been. There.

-When you come back home we’ll have Gorky’s street beauty and Michurin’s summer smell sprouting out of our own garden. Who says there are only gold shops and inns at the old bazaar?-says Mara.

-The girl-I say.

She runs to the cupboard, opens the lower door and takes Lydia. She’s sleeping as a hog.

-Vangaa, Vanghaaa, bring some soda, and quick.

She rubs the pale cross out of Lyda's forehead.

–I’ll tell that woman once I get these ragged legs to Vodno. I’ll tell that woman, that mother of mine.

I look at Mara, eyes set on Vangha and say:

-Mutra mini.

In the hall, Vangha’s putting on a red lipstick in front of the golden mirror I bought at the antiquity shop behind the city square.

She looks at us both,

-grandma’s old-fashioned Momma, don’t you worry, don’t you worry a bit.

 I am off to Pirin café with Kata. Poppa, I left a new poem behind the City park painting. There’s your communist Gorky.

I hear the dog bark as she goes down the street where Skopjans wait for her.

-Merdita-she’s slowly picking up Albanian.

-What’s a communist?-asks Lyda.

-Go to bed kiddo.

-Father, will you bring me a crochet scarf blue, sparkly pink, and purple? Vanga said I don’t need it now but one day when, she said, when the rain falls in June, when radios shut down and reopen, when fortresses, buses and aero-planes crush and apple trees stopped blooming and then who knows she said bloomed again, if I wanted to, I could still wear the scarf from you, it won’t be old-fashioned, she said.

-Father-she moved her hand to touch mine.

I took the suitcase from the table and said:

-Lyda, go to bed now.

Father, Vangha said, father, that, when you come back the sparrows at our window pane will change colour, and father she said, oh father, you don’t won’t to know. Can I be a communist father? She said I could, but she said I could be a bastard too?

Her mouth opened and opened again and again I didn’t listen anymore. Mara had already left the room. I could see her shadow go to bed.

I went to bed.

-Father, Vangha writes poems, talks of Skopje streets on the other side of the bridge.

Father-she turned her head at the window. She went near it and saw the shadow of the root growing inside.        

-Just, don’t forget the scarf.

I went to bed and waited for dawn to come. Everything was in order. Lyda asleep in her cupboard. Mara in bed. Mite on Leninova at his girlfriend’s. Kata in church. Vangha at the front door, sitting on the stairs.

-Did you know, Poppa, that graffiti can be such an extraordinary thing?-she said.

I opened the door.

-Wait, until you see, poppa, it can be anywhere, graffiti can come to you anywhere in Skopje.

I closed the door behind me. I went there. In Gjorce, at where the end of our city is. On the other side of the bridge, the woman was waiting for me. It’s not easy, they say, to leave Skopje.

I walked down the bridge, I walked down the streets and walked, for a long time, and each piece of graffiti was pulling me backwards.

 submitted by Afrodita Nikolova