Bereaved Coping

The night is the elephant's face
carved with dead ends.
The windshield gloss is black
and red and then black again.
The red flashing light above
the stop sign revealed my father
standing on the sidewalk.
He tried to hold the light and
the darkness, but they melted
between his fingers as hot resin.
The syrup drips on his shoes
we buried him in. His ghost
wants to speak about issues
that his body couldn't. His ghost
is breaking into a number of
wheezing shrapnels of silent syllables.
The light is still flashing with
my father's heartbeat, in the colors
of his blood, black then red,
and black again. In three seconds,
we made amends for the past
27 years at the stop sign.
Left then right and left again,
we looked. The throttling engine
swaddled our throats. The headlights
can reveal only so much.
We parted in the rearview mirror
and flashed at each other from afar,
like the trembling light of dying stars.

Nikola Milosavljevic was born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia where he studied literature at the University of Belgrade. For the past ten years, he has lived in Orlando, Florida where he writes his poetry with a fresh perspective. Nikola's work appeared in Bristol Noir, Blue Villa Magazine, and Poetry Super Highway.