People with Burnt Tongues (Ana Lakaliska)

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The Skopje sky is like a silver blister, ready to splash its contents all over this city of statues. So monotonous, concrete, enveloped in a mist of exhaust fumes and the noise of heels on top of the shrill voices of street vendors. Little barefoot children, splashing in the puddles from yesterday’s downpour, chasing people, begging for spare change. Chestnuts being roasted on every corner. Massive billboards hover above our heads.

We escape into a café. We haven’t seen each other in a while. Not much is different. Mya has changed her hair back as it was three years ago. It still makes her look older. “That’s what I was going for,” she always said, when we strove to find something pleasant to remark after her unfortunate visits to the hairdresser’s. But she doesn’t really care. She never has.

I came here to write, Mya came with me to dispel the awkwardness, as if to write in public were a crime, a kinky thing to do. We pick a spot in the back, dark, understated corner; we didn’t come here to be seen, we came here to see each other, catch up.

I place a notebook in my lap, I cover it with my scarf, so that people won’t see, won’t wonder, won’t judge. We order. “An espresso for me,” I say to the waitress, while Mya is in the mood for tea.

The day has descended heavily on the city today. We walked for only fifteen minutes to get here, no more, and yet, we’re drained.

The grim day follows us through the window. The lights on the upper floor are lit, giving our surroundings the sweet mellow hue of an almost ripe peach. A soft cloud of cigarette smoke hovers, squeezing through the railing. I spot a pinch of cinnamon with the tobacco. I should have ordered something with cinnamon.

A couple is positioned in the booth across from us. They’re like ghosts; they’re made into bland shadows by the light throwing itself in from behind their backs. They sit apart, she on the sofa, he on a recliner. Two cups and a sugar shaker rest on the table between their legs.




I notice the God-awful, Macedonian pop music in the background. This used to be a classier place. Smooth jazz, world music, gigs in the evenings. Today, we’re surrounded by guys with the same haircuts, sporting the same striped sweaters and ray-bans on a day with no sun at all. Almost all the girls have their hair in a bun. That’s one trend I’ve missed out on lately, I guess.

She flips through the menu as one would do at a dentist’s waiting room. His eyes are lifted towards the flat-screen, but do not meet it. The air between the two of them seems thicker than the rest of it.




In all my eagerness to get warm, I take a sip from my coffee. I burn my tongue. I set the cup down while my face twists in a knot.

Mya cracks up. “Rash!” She smiles and dips the tea bag in her cup. I cringe and look away again.

He’s playing with a lighter. His elbows are on his knees, his head in a bow. She sits there with her hands joined on the side of her hip. They share no words.



Mya speaks about her summer vacation; about her studies; about her boyfriend’s studies. They’ve been together for ages. I listen with only one ear. She talks about the last party I missed, about a semi-known singer and her lover who is her neighbor, about another friend’s feud with one of her professors. I scribble in my notebook.

He adds some sugar to his coffee and twirls the spoon in it with a lightness of wrist often met in men whose only physical activity in the day is this circular aerobic workout. He lifts the sugar halfway towards her, not looking. Her head, as in a twitch, shakes to say no. He pulls it back softly.



Mya starts talking about the time her boyfriend and she were pulled over by a police officer for speeding and they cheated out of it by pretending she had appendicitis and he was rushing her to the hospital. She says it would have been pretty nasty if they hadn’t found a way out, since they were pretty much intoxicated and ever so slightly high, at least he was. She sees I’m amused, so she becomes even more animated in telling. Her hands are flying around. It’s not the story I’m so entertained by -- this is the fourth time I’ve heard it -- but I had never heard it from her. I laugh because I notice how the story has morphed from one gossip’s mouth to the next. Or maybe she is just spicing it up for me. She does that sometimes. Now, I’m not saying she is a liar or anything of the sort; she just likes things a little bit over the top. Like that shirt she is wearing. Too… pink. My glance strays from her once again.

The waitress places a bill on their table, joining their vow of silence and walks away, as with people she knows, people she trusts. He places two bills on top of it without looking at it. She is already in her coat and extends a step towards the door.

Mya asks how I’ve been doing these last few months. I sigh. I start speaking of meaningless things, minor endeavors, bumps on the road. Mya listens as if I’m relating the truth about the origin of the Universe. It’s always been baffling to me; I never managed to develop that keen interest in other people’s affairs. Still, I babble on.

She pushes the heavy glass door and is out of the café, while he’s still battling with one of the sleeves of his jacket. He catches up with her and his arm goes dryly around her hip, like two tree trunks fighting for territory. They walk out of sight. The crisp air from when she opened the door arrives in our corner. They’re replaced by a solitary, pale statue of a pained woman wrapped around a guitar on the promenade.




It’s one of those new, ugly ones, completely ridiculous. They haunt this city. It’s like Skopje doesn’t need its mortal citizens anymore. It has its new, sound-proof, marble and gypsum ones.




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Ana Lakaliska is a student of English language and literature at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia. She has been writing from an early age and has won a number of local and national awards for her poetry. Some of her poems have appeared in collections and publications from competitions, as well as Macedonian newspapers and periodicals.

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“People with Burnt Tongues” is copyright 2010, by Ana Lakaliska. All rights are reserved. This story may not be reprinted or reposted without permission from the author.

The Skopje images/artwork are copyright 2010, by Jennifer Semple Siegel and may not be reprinted or reposted without permission.

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Short Announcements via Twitter

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I have added a Twitter widget to the left panel; from now on, short announcements will be via Twitter.

Longer, more complicated announcements will still appear on this thread.
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Short Story: “A Pomegranate Heart” (Afrodita Nikolova)

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About this video

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I know that I will most certainly die. You do things and then you die. Gandhi said: “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

See that small child eating pomegranate on the bench in the yard of the old wooden house? Well, that’s me. When I was little there were two things I couldn’t resist: looking at girls in miniskirts and eating pomegranates.

Girls will be girls, but pomegranates, that juicy wet liquid, blood soaring in the mouth to 99 degrees, that’s something.

When I was little I must’ve thought that my Momma’s right breast was a pomegranate, for I’m told that I clung to it and only to it, perpetually. I clung to my older sister too, but I guess it must’ve been that she always wore those velvet miniskirts.

I used to think that the moon is one huuge pomegranate, yellow from the outside, but red from the inside. I always had these dreams of squeezing the moon, but with my teeth. The erotic substance, the red juice bubbling in my mouth cavity as the mass of red juicy seeds sprinkled the inside walls of the cheeks. There is nothing erotic about it, yes, I know.



What I also know is that the moon is not a pomegranate, I was told so afterwards, but did that prevent me from believing in my childhood theory? No. Did that prevent the child, sitting on the bench in the yard of the old wooden house, from expecting every winter, the snow to fall in red snowflakes? No. I was definitely convinced that if I don’t sink my teeth into the moon’s core, than someone else will do it and he will fail to do it properly and the red dense liquid will fall onto the clouds and it’ll get stuck in them as food gets stuck in teeth, or maybe as gore forms on an infected wound. That’s why I expected to see, every damn winter, how these clouds release the moon’s gore on the surface of earth, as red snow. Even then I knew of envy. Maybe I didn’t know it was called so, but I did have this unknown warm suffocating feeling inside, every time I thought someone else would spill the moon’s insights, let alone that I won’t even know about it, because there maybe won’t be snow to foretell it, or if it came as rain maybe I’d think it was only muddy rain. People envy, children too, the one who says he doesn’t lies, but I envied someone without a face, body, name, without even being sure of someone’s existence, but as the globe is a cradle of so many people, I knew that some day, someone will come up with this idea. I knew that this childish idea will mature soon enough in some human mind.

I’m telling you, it wasn’t me, if it was, I would be glad to tell you it was. I couldn’t have tasted the real moon’s substance. I do admit that I like eating pomegranates even now, but I doubt that even Neil Armstrong could have tasted something of it on the moon. It is totally absurd and imaginary.



When I was an adolescent, my Poppa used to be my best companion. I knew then how stupid was to have been in fear of my childhood theory so I shunned it. It was then that I clung to Poppa, more than to any other member of my family, though he didn’t wear a mini skirt, and though I still loved eating pomegranates and staring at girls in mini skirts.

He unlocked the door of reality to me, the medicine and mystery of human body function.

Thanks, Poppa, I owe you the degree I’ve acquired in medicine, may you rest in peace.

He died from a heart condition. It was these clogs of blood that formed in his vessels, which stopped the flow of blood forever. The great philosopher Martin Dubrakov Pleskov ceased to be, not his theories.

Yes, I know that “great minds think alike,” my Poppa used to say that. He liked literature a hell of a lot. He told me once, I remember, to cherish the science, medical science, but he always had a subtle way of getting to his point. He instigated my becoming a cardiologist and he was a man of great humour. I know that talking about him now doesn’t make sense to you, but once, when Suzi was my girlfriend, he quoted: “…give her an onion, it’s your heart wrapped in brown paper.” You see now, isn’t that an improvement to my childish theory, to say that the moon is a heart wrapped in yellow and grey paper?

My Poppa died on the table, his chest, open in front of my eyes, under the bloody plastic gloves on my hands.

Even as I was holding the instruments, I knew I couldn’t fix his clogged vessels.

Was it difficult?

It was, but isn’t it that “whatever you do in life it will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it”?

I tell you now, dear lawyer. I’m not guilty of any crime. I wasn’t able to help the patient Majovski as I couldn’t help my Poppa. All patients are equal to me. If I say in an interview or in a book something that may imply myself being a doer of a crime, it is all empty association. And, man is not always what he says or what he does.



I do admit and it is written in my record, and in my biography that I did, after the death of Poppa, take his heart and sink my teeth into it. Does that make me a perpetrator? It is in accordance to the law that one may do what he chooses with his relative’s remains. Is it moral? Grief-stricken people are free even of the possibility to sense morality. That is my story, dear Ms Paula Korevski, you are the lawyer whom I trust thoroughly and you have to know I’m not guilty of any crime.

Mr B. Dubrakov Pleskov, a renowned cardiologist, was led to court the following week, mumbling under his breath, “the moon is a heart, a pomegranate, and all human hearts are beating moons, pomegranates.”

The case about the missing patients’ hearts is still in process. It is said that in one of his interviews he supposedly stated that he always taught his children the theory of the moon being a pomegranate when they were small. When they became adults they were well aware that the moon is only the round object that moves in the sky around the Earth and can be seen at night.

The sources continue to claim that Mr Pleskov was taken away somewhere… “Old age snuffs out the flame one has for women,” Pleskov told the media, “but it never extinguishes the gluttony to eat pomegranates.”

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“A Pomegranate Heart” is copyright 2010, by Afrodita Nikolova. All rights are reserved. This story may not be reprinted or reposted without permission from the author.

The video and images (“A Pomegranate is a Beating Heart”) are copyright 2010, by Jennifer Semple Siegel.

“Copper Mountain,” the YouTube track for “A Pomegranate is a Beating Heart,” is courtesy of Dan-O: Free Music by DanoSongs.com.
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At the Mid Hour of Night (Thomas Moore, 1779–1852)

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At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly
To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye;
And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air
To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there,
And tell me our love is remember'd even in the sky.

Then I sing the wild song it once was rapture to hear,
When our voices commingling breathed like one on the ear;
And as Echo far off through the vale my sad orison rolls,
I think, O my love! 'tis thy voice from the Kingdom of Souls
Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear.

Thomas Moore
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ANNOUNCEMENT: Admin Currently On Sabbatical

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As you may have noticed, I have not been posting much here lately.

Currently, I am on a sabbatical, serving as a Fulbright Scholar in Skopje, Macedonia, which does take significant time.

I haven't forgotten about Poets.net; in fact, I'm thinking about ways I can improve the site, although such improvements must wait until I return home in July 2010.

Meanwhile, I'm maintaining two blogs:

MacedonianJournal.com (my online journal)

and

MsSiegel.com (my academic site for my students)

In the near future, with my University of Skopje chairperson, I will be working on an online journal for Macedonian Literature in English translation.

I'm also writing a novel, tentatively titled Corpus Delicious, which I'm posting online as a first draft.

This is an exciting time for me--I'm having a great time in the Balkans--but it also means that some projects must be placed on the back burner for now, and Poets.net is one of them.

From time to time, I will post works here that catch my fancy, perhaps some stories by my Creative Writing students.

I have already read some pretty impressive work by them, even though English is their second language.

Until later!
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On Seeing Rothko's No. 14, 1960 (Carolyn Foster Segal)

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It's a Roman shade, the thick dull red

falling halfway, to blot out

the evening sky,

or a thick swath of happiness,

the kind that arrives from nowhere

and knocks you out,

or the last scene in a Bergman film--

the black line at the horizon,

that hilltop parade of

the dead--backlit and

somehow triumphant.

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See Rothko's No. 14, 1960

Mark Rothko
No. 14, 1960, 1960
oil on canvas
114 1/2 in. x 105 5/8 in. (290.83 cm x 268.29 cm)
Collection SFMOMA, Helen Crocker Russell Fund purchase
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Carolyn Foster Segal teaches creative writing, American literature, and film at Cedar Crest college, in Allentown, PA. She writes humorous essays for The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, and The Irascible Professor; her other essays, stories, and poems have appeared in over fifty publications, including, most recently, 2RiverView and Long Island Quarterly.

This poem is copyright 2009 by Carolyn Foster Segal and is posted here with permission.
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