spew of toilet plume

Holding it in

Can you hold it in?

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         At my 27th birthday dinner,  
  Mama talked about how I used to
             avoid public _toilets.  
                       How it didn't matter how long we were out for   
                   I would hold it in.  
             Is this why my bladder is for shit now?                             
                               
                               The average person spends three years of their life 
                          not closing the lid before they flush

  living with the _spew of ^toilet plume.

                                
                                   This is why I keep my towels in my bedroom 
                                                 when I live with other ppl.

spew of toilet plume

I held it for over 24 hours once in 2013
when we were driving through Bosna
to get to Dubrovnik.

hills in the distance, some buildings with red roofs amongst very green forest/trees, a slope leading down to a river

a very stilly river between two rocky hills with sporadic greenery, a cars grey window framing it all I spent a lot of time comparing this drive
to the Hum/Šćepan Polje crossing,
the narrow two way dirt tracks
with potholes and sharp turns,
the steep drops into
the Tear of Europe,
the glinting confluence
of three rivers,
the crosses or flowers or photos
framing the crumbling edges of the dirt track.
There is a project with no estimated start date
to fix the 20km of deadly road.

a blurry white statue of an angel with a foggy grey brown sky When night fell
we sank into a portal
without noticing.
I slept and woke several times.
One time I woke to a warped desert,
it was dark, no buildings or scenery at all,
like a vacation to the void,
with the exception of a dirt track.
The only sign there was a track
was the lights of a truck a few kilometres ahead of us.
In those lights, I could see the road was serpentine.
the tops of black pointy building tops reflected on a purple-blue lake I couldn’t get back to sleep after that.
I can’t remember how we recalibrated
or what country we were in at the time.

My sister says she doesn’t remember any of that
but she knows it was the same drive
when we stopped at a restoran
in the middle of the forest
because she needed to piss.
They only had a čučavac toilet
so Mama had to teach her how to use it.
We bought a Fanta from the restoran
and Mama got sick of holding it after an hour,
so she threw the liquid
out the window,
squished the can
and tossed it in our plastic bag for trash.

Mama says we were going through Trebinje
but we were lost before that,
lost in the mountains,
the GPS took us somewhere,
there was a road under construction.
Halfway you go on it and then it just stops.
They ran out of money to finish it.
Tata had to reverse
but there was no room to turn around,
it was too steep.
There was a čučavac behind the restoran.
It was right after the restoran
we got lost the first time.
There is a joke about Serbian GPS.
Mama never tells me the joke.

Tata shouts
Jel ata piše o politiku?
Mama says
Ne, više od istoriju.
Mama asks
are you writing poetry or a novel?
I say poetry,
but not every story will become a poem,
not every conversation needs to be shared.

Saša Stanišić writes
‘What are we supposed to picture
as these “hard Slavic endings”?’
I write
as we plunged into a piss dream
I morphed into a
Mama was a horse, my sister a husky,
Tata was a songbird.
You don’t need to know the rest.