After the Break-up
2006
I take a two-hour train along the Elbe
past towns & factory smoke
to Dresden
where my ex-pat friends like to shop.
I buy green suede boots
then sit for a while
in the white light of the rebuilt
Frauenkirche where I read a pamphlet
explaining
these walls—new limestone mixed
with charred stone from the firebombing
of February 1945
same month my father crawled through
Iwo Jima’s black sand
toward the gun he finally
took & fired into haze & flesh
kept firing even after he was wounded.
He carried that grief & handed it down
so that today
in this remade city suddenly
my small losses melt into his
& into this sidewalk
as it is & as it was
into shimmering glass & collapsed
churches even into the remorse
of bombardiers who dropped silver
seeds that blossomed below
into people running
or unable to run children & grandpas
late shoppers & opera goers
so many of them lying now
unnamed in Heidefriedhof
Cemetery its walks engraved with slogans
a garden of words & stone
with commemorations each Feb. 15
—never again they say we all say—
words I carry like souvenirs
of Korea or Vietnam Kosovo Iraq
or Afghanistan. Never again will we
sweep rubble aside
to make room for corpse-filled
trucks nor rebuild hospitals
with bones not in Bosnia or Angola
Syria or Nicaragua. The body
shudders remembering
& I await my return train as pigeons flutter
against the station’s dome full of echo
& solemnity
while the loudspeaker God-voice preaches
time & departure
& forgetting.
Mother Tongue
For two weeks I’ve been an island
of English at Gymnasium Arabska
teaching language for the first time
& suddenly hungry for the voice-hum
comfort of back home cafés.
In search of my native tongue
I find Líterárni Kavárna where English
is supposedly spoken. When I enter
two men are shouting passionate Czech
their table littered with beer mugs &
books the cigarette smoke so thick
I don’t notice at first
the woman sitting alone with her own
stacked books cigarettes & long blond hair.
The spines on her table—The Dead
& The Living Diving into the Wreck
All My Pretty Ones—such old friends
I can’t help leaning over to read
what she’s writing: There is a broken
circle a circle getting smaller
& smaller. I feel my life both broken
& whole grow smaller in this strange city
& then suddenly wider when she
looks up startled & English
floods my mouth dizzying
as the Frankovka we’re both drinking—
Laura from Brooklyn & me from Maine.
She says the sexism here
still drives her up the wall even though
she’s been in Prague for ten years
& I admit how down in the dumps
I’ve been relieved
to sing the blues to someone
who understands. She invites me to her flat
on Bikupsova for cawfee sometime
& we smoke until the bartender
rattles his keys in the door
& we head in opposite directions
long past the last tram both of us
emptied of words for now & full.
Jeri Theriault’s recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship, and the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review). Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, The Texas Review, The Atlanta Review, Plume, and many other publications. Her collections include Radost, My Red and Self-Portrait as Homestead. She lives in Maine.