Customs

Poem

by Ksenija Spasic

Somewhere approaching daybreak,
I am sitting in the grass at the Hungarian border.
All I have to show for my day with rushing French and German scenery
are two unfinished poems.
I have courted sleep in contrived poses
and dreamt about beds and being so half asleep
I was unable to tell you something,
also about looking from a bus window
at huge birds
with saucer eyes and equally enormous fish
in their beaks.

Sky lightens over your father’s native land.
The countryside is truck and bottle strewn,
we wait to cross
from Clean Toilet Territory
into the Land of a Thousand Bribes.