A perceptive anthology of verses explores the parallels between riot-torn Los Angeles and Prague, the leading city in a newly divided Czechoslovakia, reflecting on the divisions–ethnic, cultural, and political–in each place. (Amazon Review)

From The Hunger Wall:

Humenne (Slovakia)

The Wedding

I.

Here was her bridal dance and there
her two sisters leaning,
cherry-cheeked, so triangular
you'd think the room was tilting,
perhaps a pine barrel rolling
underground, perhaps the borovitsa,
and the groom's brother waltzing
arm to arm and pausing only
for a round; all of them, trading
gain for loss, were the mannequins
she dressed to fit her gown,
the white so willing
to swash against the hickory pegs
and heartwood of feet crowding
in the days for one.
Here was their dance of lust,
Here, the last call's redovy tanec
to virgin's kiss,
of lining up the week's small
salary for the downing of a shot.

Yes, he was held by tradition
out of sight, the groom,
far from the drunkard's tongue
now stabbing through the ice.
Yes, he would share her wheat
of hair this last time, each hot
lip fawning up her cheeks. Yes,
he would catch her eye just now;
it drips between the globes of roses.
Yes, yes, he would charge the locked
arms of the bride's maids and breaking
ties, prepare to lift
her face up and away from seeing
all the false force of the earth
spinning, the mother's feint
of feet as if to kneeling, the veil,
instinctive in its grace, tossed
up against the ceiling,
and the ice pick
that slices space just so
that vision caught in the spindle's rift
can rend its rage of oblivion
through his brother's eye, the rush
of arms to knuckle down
its parry, the drunkard leaping
past the spillage,
past the chambers of the pupil rivering
darkness onto wine.

II.

No, she only knelt
as if the lace were bleeding,
cradling now the brother's head,
her hair draping miles of language
he was feeding to the mind;
his memory, a chestnut
bough now breaking, his silence
only shaking through the shudder,
a flute returning wind to sound.
No she didn't know
the groom, possessed,
had chased the demon pan
for days into the miles of spruce.
Yes, he might avenge
the assassin with an ax, within the inch
of breath the law allowed. No,
he chose to maim the raging eyes
as if the gendarme blessed
the rowel of briars,
and all she could think of
was the eye turned black
on her white trousseau,
and all he could think of
was to steal away beyond the walls
the guards had bribed
each night to open like a cask,
and all she remembered
was her breath tossed like a river
rasping over rocks and the wet
weeds of her bed when he left at dawn,
and all he remembered
was of the year of nightly raptures,
and mourning in the cell he had grown
like stones around his head,
and all that each remembered,
was the passion they had married
to the slow want of an embrace,
a bridal dance to death,
two continents
adrift in a world racing
past the Archduke's carriage,
falling off its rims and spinning
slowly into ash.