Nina Reljić
Root Canal
Trains are the most poetic places. Water towers in fields
are the most beautiful objects. Much to be said about
how reeds split the snow. Divergence. No, dissection. You can
focus on snow and forget your geography. This speaks
to its fluorescent quality, and how it leaves a landscape
redundant. Lays itself down like new law. I had this game
for trains: close your eyes and pretend you’re travelling
in the opposite direction. You’ll start to believe it. Open them.
Quickly, where have you been. Last night my pillow smelled
like salt beef, the smoke of it, the far-off sweet of it. I sensed
this would be an important detail over time. Something like,
the year my pillow smelled like salt beef was the year—
and I’ll miss it, somehow am already missing it. This speaks
to a narrative, the time I took the train from New York
and ended up in Philadelphia with a woman who looked
almost exactly like my mother. Outside, a car wheel spun
giddily and wouldn’t grip the ice. Her molar went bad.
They had to kill the nerves, she said, for the good of the mouth.
February in Brooklyn
The sparrows fuss over a chicken carcass—
rib cage with the taut, gray meat. The sparrows
don’t care how I feel about that. It doesn’tdisrupt
their sense of order as it does mine. They aren’t
interested in the questions I’ve been asking
myself of late, like how much relief is too much.
How many people should love me at any one time.
Salt water. Stock. Seaweed extract. They call it
“plumping” and it’s supposed to make the meat
juicy. It turns meat into more meat. These days
I don’t listen to music, I’ve been thinking about
want. Across oceans people have bodies and desire
other people. In spite of everything. We want things
so bad it makes us embarrassing. I don’t believe in
cool songs, I wish famous people would sing exactly
what they mean. Like the Divinyls. Chrissy with
the red bangs. Electric yellow guitar. Was there
ever a more crystalline way of saying, I don’t want
anybody else, when I think about you, I touch myself?
Lone Star State
My cowboy arrives at the gas station. Tasselled boots
on terrain. He is staunch, of cooked meat. His large fingers
hook into the belt loop of his jeans, which are blue as
a prayer at the wheel and god’s mercy. He is familiar with
muscle and bone. Name an animal, he’s skinned it. As a boy,
his father took him fishing on the banks of Lake Buchanan.
The flesh of the cheek is his favourite, slight and delicious.
Don’t the gills look like slashes. Don’t their bodies
seem helpless. Sure, it gets lonesome, but the sky keeps
him here, colour of a world ending. When he gets poetic
like this, he casts his eyes far out. He loves my elbows,
the skulls of my knees. He holds my chin very still
like he is thumbing a stone. When he presses against me
I come away smelling of him, which is the smell of dusk,
which is the smell of many moving bodies. My free
ramblin’ man. I don’t love him, I never could.
I respect the grace of his legs. I touch his torso because
it’s expansive and there. When he says, Kiss me baby
I kiss him, but I do it as a toad. This is a secret game I play.
In bed, when we argue, I remind him he isn’t real. I intend
for this to hurt, but he twists the hair of his stomach and
laughs, like he was once very hungry and now he is full.
Let Me No Longer Walk Away
About the Author
Nina Reljić is a writer from London. She is in the Poetry concentration at Columbia. Her work is interested in human relationships, cities, time, distance, and foodstuff.