Sonja
Hristina
Bjelić
Poet, birth worker and PhD student based between NYC and Belgrade, Serbia
POET
I completed an MFA in Poetry from New York University in 2019.
My work (often collaborative) has appeared in Gulf Coast, Black Box
Manifold, Foglifter, Leveler, No, Dear, NECK, DATABLEED, 3:AM Magazine and
Mannequinhaus,
among other places.
My current project and first book explores identity, family constellations, love, war, and the potential and fallibility of language.
War chases war in the quietude,
just as birth burns despite the body’s exhaustion
Childbirth is our battle Spero finger-painted
on a pennant I return to
in the seventh hour
where the body expels itself
Standing in the clearing of my own making
where the barefooted muse
asks what dislocated hour wakes me?
In this eerie stillness where we are but phantoms
will the poet’s mural endure the nightmare
of a decimated now, where mothers beget children underground
as the foliage cedes to occupation
and the wind is a prisoner in its native land
Our hearts are tentacles transmitting light
she says, language impregnates earth
and we are all children spurred from dirt
We wake inside a gasoline dream
and yet we carry the hazelnut between our breasts
I was born into the century of suffering
I was carried in on the ailerons of verse
I was carried out on the pine's lowly dirge
-excerpted from current manuscript