my father explains why they left me behind when defecting
Alina Stefanescu
after Hoa Nyugen's "Unrelated Future Tense"
You are the same to me.
The baby in the photo you were, dark
curls we kissed before fleeing.
Your mom was pregnant with
the one she birthed in America.
Your eyes didn't match.
One was yellower.
And no leaves on the lindens then
we didn't know if we'd see you again.
We didn't know if we'd see you again
and know leaves on the lindens then.
One was yellower.
Your eyes didn't match
the one she birthed in America.
Your mom was pregnant with
curls we kissed before fleeing.
The baby in the photo you were, dark
you are. The same to me.
"S-ar putea crede..."
titled after an early poem by Paul Celan; it means "one could think" or "one might think" in Romanian
Snow has two sides, has eyes
the sharp edge of a snowflake.
Tonight neighbors scream football;
helicopters & sirens drag humans
into the hospital nearby.
Both near & by: inside.
Paper adolescence waits in a drawer
like a sketched eagle with ice caves for eyes. The wilting
monosyllabic acts of courage. One thinks nothing
happens and knows everything
lies, dies: both near & by.
The others who came after
wore t-shirts announcing the prize; a certain commercial
panache. The wound is a wedge
between poems without papers, hands
missing palms. Only the scrimmage
of screams, seeking allegiance in sides.
When Called Away from Ghost Commune By Howls
I met the wolf on his terrain, in the desert
where stars grew stadiums. Boulders hedged
my body like boyfriends I mounted.
I sat atop Bobby & Jimbo & Tim.
This thing I wanted from night: to unparch
what deserts us, what devours by desiccating,
by slowly drying out. Night was silent.
The wolf's thirst chiseled the range, shaping
routes for water to run. It was his
ache who laid canyons between hardness
and softening. The sun wins everything
the sky cannot climb. I follow the wild
that hunts me. We circle each other
like horses at opposite ends of a carousel,
my daughter's first constellations.
Writer’s Notebook
Poetry helps me find a way to touch the unspeakable. Each of these poems bloomed in dialogue with poems written by others. For example, "my father explains why they left me behind before defecting" grew from fascination with Hoa Nyugen's remarkable poem, "Unrelated Future Tense," and the patterns she introduces, enabling the poem to turn back on itself through repetition, creating a new temporality. I needed to understand how my parents left me in a dictatorship with no assurance that they would ever see me again, and Nyugen's form created a threshold for this encounter. "When Called Away from Ghost Commune By Howls" mucked around with the idea of ghost commune that came from a day saturated in the poems of Ewa Lipska. My daughter turned 13 during this lonely pandemic year, and the ghost commune -- all idylls of community-- felt deserted. I played by adapting the constraint of 14-lines, a vestigial sonnet creature. Loneliness layered over estrangement when studying Paul Celan's early poems, a few of which were written in Romanian. Celan haunts me. "S-ar putea crede..." moves using repetition, and I wanted to play with these words, with the weight of one might think, and the tension between suppositions, and how positionality places things side by side, how objects carry our thoughts, how friendship, for Celan, was so ephemeral, so unreliable. There was something I needed from his paper adolescence, from the self hidden inside a drawer, from the samizdat of who he was in Bucharest, and what belonging means. What it means to be loved and to belong: how we say these things in stadiums.
about the writer
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020). Her poetry collection, dor, is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press in July 2021. Alina's writing can be found (or is forthcoming in) Prairie Schooner, BOMB, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, and a reviewer for other journals, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.