Dallas, TX
The city delivered secrets, gray squirrels crying at wee hours, velvet sun caught in between eyelids while listening to the thump of lovers above you, a slow erosion of thoughts, beheaded gods floating in coffee cups, weird stories gained at the laundromat, wearing grief sweaters to grey campus rooms, the promise of water behind the scorched skin, how to run a blade through the head of a melon, stay fluent in damage, call it răul care nu doarme, le mal qui t’accompagne, here one can easily slip in between the cracks of languages, the unseen core of haunting, that dream where you chase giggles, little footsteps, or a whiff of sarmale, your new friend Betty baking savarine for church, feast another god with a sweet tooth, trinkets of dor, this poem writing itself in tongues, begging for a patch of sky to grow wings over highway 75, before the day ripens, you will open another paper vein, stumble across the sword, slay the foreign dawn.
Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, Waxwing, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. Her second poetry collection, Praise the Unburied, was published in 2021 with Chaffinch Press. She is the Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation.
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