patronus - Anita Pajević

there, on the ground floor of our sitting room

in a pot squats a tree

made of life

mum hasn’t changed its soil

in 17 years

since dad gave it to her

and it’s never tipped over

from its own weight

not when we talked loudly, not when we bothered it, played ball toss, touched it with our feet,

not when it squeaked round the room in december swapping north for south

even then we didn’t give it minerals

from time to time we fed it water

mum (between us) believes

that dad lives in the tree

this upsets me

because in its pot I want to bury each

moth which shakes off its tiny life into our sink

moths die in drains

and I hear their deaths in

light bulbs and empty walls

it’s loud if you don’t talk to them

when you take them out on a chopping board to fly off into the wind

the tree of life brought me to

mum and dad

in the pot

beneath the soil they

pondered me

my tree now breathes through a straw topped with

a plastic flower

and there’s a bump on its neck

in each pot lives an

injured seal

if I summon patronus

won’t I unearth

the mother of all butterflies

the butterfly colossus

with a flap of his heavy wings he will spray the soil

all over the curtains

take a sip of the morning coffee

like he used to do with mum

and crumble with fear for having seen us all

and ask me about my funny e-mail address

and tell us he likes

the place he came from but still

we should pack up plenty of pebbles and shells because they’re running out up there

they have an excess of plants

the plants are mages and merlins over there

while pot and potash are the same linguistic gender

they all graze on marjoram

cloves walk the earth

they make the grand canyon out of warm plasticine

he left turned on felt-tips all over the room

till I blinked

supressed it all

into coincidence

---

Anita Pajević (born 1989) Bosnia-Herzegovina

Translated by Mirza Purić

Source: EuropeNow