In Their Own Words
Ana Božičević on “&”
Who do I write to
If you’re long gone.
When people say,
It’s between myself
And God
What if the God part is off?
Someone turn God
Back on!
The kind that
Makes me feel like
It’s the same
If I write to you or Them
Or to an old
Long piece of wood that
Lay by the stable—
I know it’s
Not supposed
To be permanent,
None of it and no one, so
Why did They
Make it so precious
Then. Are people
Destroying everything
Out of the need
To take
And keep everything?
Yes. For me,
I don’t
Need much
But the comfort
Of another world
The parallel universe
Where somehow
It worked out
And birds are singing,
There is peace
When you & I
Are an ampersand away
God’s in
The ampersand . . .
But no one says
Our names together
Anymore
We wholly ghosted
Each other
& it’s been a long time
Since I talked to God—
They got too high
And thought
They were dying
Sent me a postcard
From heaven
Saying I hate the sun
And I miss
Lucifer
The middle manager
Turned crook
He picked a better animal
To hide in
The snake that
Still on some nights
Forms an ampersand
& thinks of love.
”&” from New Life, copyright 2023 by Ana Božičević. Used with the permission of the author and Wave Books.
About "&"
The friend with whom I shared the apartment got a beautiful pink little snake. Sometimes it would curl into the shape of an &. I admired this creature, so full of meaning in the world of people, but also a person itself. A whole other world. The body of the snake looked like a sigil. Its ampersand a shape that connects, it’s Love.
The poem is about the loss and lossness of You. The ampersand is what comes between you & me. And if the You in our poems is God, where are They? What word could the ampersand lasso in to fill that void? Maybe God is in the ampersand.
I thought of objects that seemed godlike to me – a piece of wood, so-called stožina, that would hold up a haystack before the machine-made bales made it obsolete. The stick in the stack. Laid on its side by the stable, that trunk had an unearthly quality, like an implement of another realm.
I had this vision of a lonely God writing a postcard from heaven, saying I miss Lucifer Morning Star – and of the human animal, just like the snake, embodying a myth. If not God, why God-shaped? Sometimes it’s all so hard to grasp – having limbs. They form shapes, the body a letter changing meaning.
Limbs grasping to hold precious things that dissolve, like the hands of a raccoon reaching after cotton candy it tried to wash in the basin. If Loss is one constant in Life…then why do we run down the world trying to keep what we’re not meant to. My father says there’s a German saying: “the last shirt has no pockets.”
