Clare Needham
Clare Needham is the author of the novella Bad Books, published by Ploughshares Solos in 2015. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Stinging Fly, New York Tyrant, Grub Street, Catapult, Bodega Magazine, and elsewhere. Her poems have also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best American Poetry series, and her work has received support from MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. She is currently working on a novel
WAR SUMMER
At the Museum of Yugoslav History
A hand folds and unfolds a piece of white paper into squares. With each fold, an interpretation: “a memorial site – a tourist attraction – a public space – a film set – a battlefield – a museum.”
Border-Crossing
At dusk, we arrive at the edge of North Macedonia and Greece. An empty train station, a shuttered duty-free, stray dogs. A brave puppy approaches some passengers who have gotten out to stretch their legs. It is brown and white and lowers its head. They give it bits of sandwich.
Border-Crossing
At night we cross into Serbia, border unseen. I am awoken several times and asked for ticket and passport. The knocks are loud, and each time three men stand as I am half-in, half-out of a sleeping car bed. I pull my hair back, I show them my face. I am prompt. I am afraid. One agent looks at me and says, “America,” amazed.
Border-Crossing
There is no direct route from Belgrade to Sarajevo. We pass through cornfields, small towns. The bus driver stops to buy watermelon.
On the radio, news from Gaza. It’s easy to pick out words like Khan Younis, site of airstrikes, the place where civilians died in a café while watching the Argentine-Netherlands semi-finals at the World Cup.
The driver changes stations. David Bowie’s greatest hits.
Rest Stop
The driver pulls onto gravel, parks outside a wooden lodge ringed with yellow flags for Jelen Beer. The logo is a deer head. It means primitive, rural, blood-soaked Europe – only in my mind. We file off the bus. The air is cool, the sky grey. Across the road is a meadow, an abandoned barn, a pine forest. And a memorial. Bad things happened here in 1914, 1942, 1952, and nothing since.
Jewish Graves in Ukraine
The graves are old and uncared for. They sleep tilted, bow their stone grey towards lush ferns, wildflowers with delicate, wisp-white names. Sheltered by tall trees that whisper and rustle in gentle wind. Who sleeps there…I do not know, they’re all long gone, sunk in rich, remote soil…just the posts remain. Gentle field of stones, field at rest in ferns, among flowers and trees…as if the graves are Chernobyl, post-nature, new-nature. The air now calm, now the questioning can begin.
Faveloukis
Several Greek friends have assured me that my family name means nothing in their language. Still, I search the database at the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki to see if anyone with its spelling or similar made it further south than my grandmother in Odesa – no one. The best guess is the name was mispronounced and misspelled by various officials who spoke and wrote in various languages and alphabets. When my grandmother and her sisters arrived at Ellis Island on forged passports, the name was shortened to a sweet and easy American “Fab.”
Sarajevo, Laylat al-Qadr
The main street in Sarajevo’s old city, Ferhadija, is decorated with lights for Ramadan. Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest night of the year. Two girls in hijab pay their respects at the eternal flame, Sarajevo’s memorial to victims of the Second World War. An old woman sits nearby and sells second-hand stuffed animals.
By a set of stairs leading down to Ferhadija is a monument to four girls killed by sniper fire during the war. I think of the four boys killed last week while playing soccer on a beach in Gaza. This symmetry serves no purpose, except as a way of remembering.
Memory
Sitting in the middle row at a documentary film festival in Kiev and unable to leave in time to avoid watching two hours of footage from Operation Cast Lead. The film follows a Gazan paramedics team, greatly underequipped, as its members ran into bombed-out darkness bearing white stretchers to bring in the wounded and dead, or tend to children who die on operating tables under flickering fluorescent lights.
Men Shooting Down Planes, Starting Wars, Killing Other People’s Kids
When I finally sleep, my subconscious offers up a dream: someone has sawed a dog in half, but somehow it’s still alive.
Memory II
Winter Olympics, 1994. Katarina Witt dedicates her free skate program to the children of Sarajevo. Where have all the flowers gone? She spins in red, spins the question. Oh, when will they ever learn? After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it came out that the Stasi had compiled thousands of pages on Witt. They gave her cars and allowed her to travel to keep her from defecting to the West.
At the Museum of Yugoslav History II
The image: Three Palestinian boys playing in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, and they don’t know the photograph is taken in the days before the massacre.
I don’t know if these boys have been brought forward with time. In the photo, they are caught mid-flip as they go head-first over a low, white-washed wall. Their necks strain as their eyes focus on the ground. If they’re not careful, or skillful, they could really hurt themselves. I don’t know how they land: on their feet, or on their heads.
They flip over and they’re fine. It is an ordinary day. They walk out of the shade and into silver-hot Lebanese sun.
Making Peace Is Up to You
Says a mirror positioned either at the beginning or end of an exhibition along the Miljacka River. Photographs depict manmade situations around the world. (A bride and a groom walk through the ruins of bombed-out Beirut; a shelter under blue tarps near Calais; a sign warns drivers to watch out for humans running across Interstate 5 into the U.S. – a man grabs a woman’s hand, that grips a child’s; together they are shown running fast as shadows, on the run.)