Bosnia, Kentucky
Court documents say her name is Azra Bašic. In 1992, twin knives
strapped to the belt and boot of her Croatian uniform, she carved crosses
into the foreheads of Bosnian prisoners, slit a man’s throat,
made the others drink from the wound. I eat oatmeal and plums,
sip my coffee while I turn the pages of The Times
where customers at the Airport Market in Stanton, Kentucky discuss her arrest.
One man leans on a wooden chair, hand raised, palm up, smoke spiraling
from his cigarette. How do we go on? is always the question.
She bottle-fed a puppy, sunk a fence post, baked cakes for her friends’ birthdays,
swirling icing in buttery waves, writing their names in sugar.
She slept in Lucy Lohman’s living room. Lucy says if someone wanted to kill me,
I have no doubt she’d take the bullet. Azra says the first man she killed, it made her sick.
When the fighting broke out she fled with her son. After he died,
she was captured, promised food, cigarettes. Thy will be done, The Bible says.
She watched a girl gang-raped and left to die. Then she sliced the penis off one of the
men, threw it in the sand. St. Teresa said, I only wish I could write with both hands,
so as not to forget one thing while I am saying another. Eli Vries, a neighbor says,
I don’t think she’s guilty of anything but being a human being.
One witness says she made him drink gasoline, then set fire to his hands and feet.
Pema Chodron says we’re all sailing in the same boat. Everyone trying to escape
from pain and escalating it. Azra moans in the night, waking the house up.
The trees say nothing. Hammurabi’s Code says an eye for an eye.
Neruda says to live with the eye held hideously open. Someone said,
to help us bear the wilderness within, but I don’t remember who.
