Teaching Croatian to Tourists as a Pickup Line

by Marta Špoljar

If language is just a dialect with a flag and a navy then you are a drowning risk. You jump ships to cross my way, fumbling over soft cs — the only seas I know — but swear the water in your lungs tastes sweet. I swear if you’d been there for when Sodom and Gomorrah fell god itself would have turned to salt. You can’t drown. You need no air but the breath you steal from me.

You strip my name of half its vowels and ghost your fingers over its palatalization and I think, this is how god meant to name me. You ask if you got it right and I think, this is the first time anyone has. You ask if you got it right and I say nothing, because I don’t know how to speak the language you are inventing yet. I think we are rewriting something. I decode every lingering touch and try to pack good morning texts with enough meaning to flood a country. We kiss exclusively in silent letters. You tell me your sister could tell I was important by how you said my name and I tell you, yes, you took the word that was in the beginning and bent it to signify a someone. No one else has addressed me right since. Ask me how to wish someone a good morning and I can tell you I have nothing left to teach you. You made me when you named me. Screw every language that come before us. However you say it is right.