Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/grayscale-photography-of-sitting-person-QyrDMIEjh6M) 16.12.2023.
ZITA’S TICKET
My tries at social graces with my distant cousins
fell to blunder––I bore wine and fruit across flimsy
commie thresholds, things cheap in Yugoslavia,
where they craved good coffee and hard currency.
Alone, thirty, too casual in that irritating
American way, I stumbled, stray, into a cousin’s
wedding preps, the ladies making paper flowers
in a circle around where I, sudden guest, got
the best chair, my hair askew, my cutoffs stained,
my last shower scores of kilometers back in parts
of Italy too vague for maps. With no common words,
I knew what they were thinking––where was my wife?
Did I have any hard currency? Was I rich? (No.
What grandee wanders Europe with a canvas pack?)
So I drew a family tree with granddad, Josef,
and grandma, Yelena. That hit a sentimental
sting, “Yelitsa!” Long dead teenager sent to America
to toil in her uncle’s bar. Yelitsa, still missed,
still loved! I drew a pencil line straight to her daughter,
my mom, Zita. “Zita!” Even deeper elation,
felt decades after Zita’d sent goods from America
to ease their postwar scarcities. (How had she
done it? Tubercular, penniless herself, she’d posted
boxes of clothes and cans in stuffings of hard currency.)
Now they adored me––express ticket to approval.
Offering a rare treat in July heat, they rushed
to serve me thick black coffee. So I’d gained bona
fides and forced back sips of sour commie mud
from who knows what tropic friendly with the Soviets.
After that debut in Rijeka, “Zita” opened doors
in Loborika and Lanicsce that would’ve been barred
to some sunburnt guy from Colorado. Grappa
would pour, hidden behind stove chimneys, covert
and quickly drunkening, potent moonshine. I basked
in local reknown, Zita’s son, much as I basked
in unearned prosperity, postwar American guy
crossing borders and ideologies, clueless, breezy,
blessed in Yankee currency, too spoiled to be uneasy.
About the Author: A native of California’s Mendocino Coast, Lee Patton has enjoyed life in Colorado for decades. His first poetry collection, In Disturbed Soil, was launched in 2021 from Kelsay Books. Recent poems appear in Global Poemic, Heirlock, Impossible Archetype, and New Verse News. His fifth novel, Coming to Life on South High, also came out in 2021.
