Delusions of an Immigrant Child
My early 2000s in America looked like fried chicken
for family dinner in Tata’s rented semi-truck
whenever he had a delivery nearby. Haven’t had
better chicken since but also haven’t had to miss
Tata as much. Sometimes he’d be gone for months,
and it was just Mama, Ivana, and me in our 2-bed
low-income housing someone in the government
decided to leave for us immigrants. Due to the war,
ex-Yugoslavians lived in most of these apartments.
I mean we swarmed the place. It was The Immigrant Dream.
We could pretend, really pretend, we were home
when we stayed within the complex. The smells of pasulj
and punjene paprike and slanina coming from our kitchen
windows, the words dobar dan, jebi ga, and otadzbina
in our native tongues, the handstitched clothes drooping
from lines, the working fathers and lonely mothers.
The sacrifice. As kids cocooned from the foreignness
we were in, we got childhood back for a little while,
at least until family dinner ended and we had to say goodbye
to Tata, who’d take the concept of home on the road
with him. Back in our apartment, we huddled with Mama,
absence and America seeping in through the floor.
Milica Mijatović is a Serb poet and translator. Her chapbook War Food won the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition and was published in May 2023 by Southword Editions. Her poetry appears in Rattle, Salamander, Plume, and elsewhere. She serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Consequence.