Poetry of Bryan Tomasovich > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Bryan Tomasovich

Poems from Ouisconsin appear in the summer, 2004 issue of The Emergency
Almanac. Elsewhere, Bryan Tomasovich's poems can be found in The Massachusetts Review, ISLE, 5 Trope, DIAGRAM, Jubilat, and Nimrod. He teaches at Antioch University Seattle, where he is faculty editor of KNOCK.

Manželka

Bryan Tomasovich

My wife

will call out to our child with the right accent, for its name
will not be American.

I would need to travel back in time to pronounce it
just so

but the language the child knows from birth
in the Old Country
will shape its jaw

and the countenance of those ancestors

in the clouds will come alive.

Great-Grandpa Krist...his first wife, before Katerína, died in childbirth
with the baby. I'm sure he would have chosen to die. Instead, he
set out for America.

Day by day he watched his wife
become a mother.
Then, he abandons home. How not to?

Somewhere in Milwaukee lies a rotten hull of a ship
where my great-grandpa forced hope
on himself, then struggled up to the island
that is America.

My wife asks me to feel the baby inside
and to listen. Sometimes, when her belly is quiet, I think
both have died.
That they will go on expecting right into the dark.

Then a beautiful rain of hiccup

and heartbeat comes and I know a new home is ahead.

Krist, I got a family coming now, and we are going
against wishes.

What was your baby's name to be? You brought danger
to your wife. We all do. Babies come out
one way or another, we know that one thing.

Even now we are warned

about ways our baby could die. Reminded

of how bad people
have it outside America.

They have in mind, Krist, us godforsaken immigrants.

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