Fred Pelka

Fred Pelka

About Jadranka

That wartime summer she was my guide and translator, the search for particular words rippling across her face as refugee torture genocide were pulled through the surface of troubled waters. And when they wouldn’t rise— Jesus Christ what is the word?— laughing in embarrassment, her smile also multi-lingual. But then there are riddles that travel a thousand years before finding their proper home. Like how, every morning, I saw my neighbors across the courtyard greet each other, the one asking some question I never understood the other laughing as he drew his index finger across his Adam’s apple. I ask Jadranka the meaning of this and she tells me— It’s old Croatian custom, also Bosnian, also Serb. You ask your neighbor, ‘How did you sleep last night?’ and he answers ‘Like my throat was slit.’” There was the scent of UN peacekeepers on Vlaska Street trying to pick up girls, and how at Dugo Selo this one child—maybe ten, maybe twelve— cowered when I entered the room. She’s like that with all men, Jadranka told me, not having to tell me why. On Sundays she took me sightseeing— I don’t want you to remember only sad things about my country— once to the cobblestones of the Strossmayer Promenade, once to a cafe near Zagreb center Where in peacetime all the poets used to sit.

Fred Pelka

A Tin Man’s Confession

for Denise

Back in the day when I could still raise my arms I thought I could see my own reflection, not perfectly, but with a certain shimmer more silver than tin. I could tell you more about that but I was so easily distracted, shaped as I was by hammer blows on this anvil of circumstance. Which is why, I suppose, I could never feel my own heart ticking even as my face turned into a garden trowel. If you’ve ever rusted in place you’ll know what I mean, how there’s a certain stupor that comes with standing in the same spot for years and years. It got to the point where every hinge soldered into place was an allegory waiting to be twisted to some devious purpose, with me not understanding how the field where I was crafted was itself an acre of hinges waiting to be turned. What burned in this empty cauldron was the tinder of all that yearning for emotion. The bottom lip of the world, the top lip of the clouds had come together to swallow me whole as I stood abandoned to inclement weather. But then what light came shining through the eyes of my enchantress in gingham! She who was borne by the tornado and whose voice became the heart beating in my empty chest. I can still hear her singing, see the basket swinging in the crook of her arm. Pick up your axe, she told me, and find your own oil can, then dance until your joints no longer squeak.

Fred Pelka

Water Works #6

I owe the universe an apology. As if I or anyone could talk to the universe even if it has large ears. Somewhere there’s a night sky containing stars in the shape of an elephant. Somewhere there’s an elephant looking up thinking: Those stars are arranged precisely in the shape of one of those absurd talking apes. We used to have tails, us talking apes, our spines curved at the end like upside down question marks asking this silent existence, Say what? I’ve heard that elephants and apes contemplate their own reflections, how on a clear night a lake might toss starlight back at the sky. I’ve been known to stand on the beach and watch lines of waves roll in like sentences, a paragraph of near infinite length. Light they say can be both wave and particle and the ocean is both a swelling against earth’s hip and single drops spilling into octopus eyes. And so the universe sends me its continual invitation, but I’ve been so remiss in my RSVP. No elephant would ever be so rude. Tell me that the human body is 90 percent water, and I’ll tell you this is why I’ve spent so much of my life drowning inside myself.