Leaving Belgrade

by Lola Haskins


           I am Croatian but my wife, Hana, she is Serbian.

Every day
Luka read in the papers the ads of willing assassins.

Every day
someone else spat in front of him on the street.

Every day
his position at the university became slightly less clear.

By the time
he decided to leave, it was too late to take anything but two cases.

The first
he packed with clothes, his, Hana's but only a few of Ivo's and Ela's

because
they were still growing. The second, Hana filled with what she could not

bring herself
to leave behind: her mother's tablecloth, her grandmother's salt shakers,

the cloth flowers
her sister had made her so she would not feel so alone in the new place. 

Luka emptied
that case and replaced its contents with so many outdated math books

he had
to sit on it to close it. When Hana protested her lost things,

Luka
told her, leave them, let's go. And she remembered how he'd worked

so late
all their married life, even on weekends, that she and the children hardly

saw him.
It was then she understood that wherever they settled, nothing would change.


* * * * *

Lola Haskins' most recent collection – Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare  (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) – was featured in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, four Florida individual artist awards, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Poetry Review, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine Award from Poetry Society of America.