Clara Burghelea (3 poems)
The twenty-year marriage
is mostly about meals. Tonight, we praise
the texture of the tiger bass and the herbs
we brought from Thassos. We share a glass
of crispy, white wine and cover vast territories
in our conversations. You let your fingers graze
on my palm, then nibble on a valerian leaf
from my salad. Some things hang in the air like
heavy fruit. The leaving, the numbness, the silences.
Outside the window, guinea pig babies
squeal at the sound of our voices. It took us
months to discover their almost human need:
to sleep on our laps while being stroked.
A Revision of the Self
begins in the lines and creases
of stanzas, faces, pencil stubs.
There is an inchoate throbbing,
a blooming space asking for alteration.
Feels like pressing curd through cloth,
the inherent softness of the solids,
its pungent flavor, the generous juices.
To be in want for word pains the fingers.
Stands an accolade in the scoop of the day,
a scrim of light, then perhaps too much dark,
the foreboding thought- women do not child,
much as a poem’s backbone milks you dry.
How to manoeuvre separation
Be the woman who pulls down
the little mirror in the vizor
before you let him break you
by air drawing a Venn diagram
of how the two of you never overlap
but live within circles of your own.
Add more lipstick on the white lips,
smack them together in confidence,
allowing the Burgundy Red to blend out
towards the edges. Don’t blink, or better,
overdo it. He might hear your ears pop.
Here is the hand, your hand, not his,
feeling the throbbing in your legs
as if they put their mind to it. Press
the sore flesh through the denim
and while doing so, forget to breath.
The car will shrink and heartbeats
will fog up all windows and somewhere
in the steamy chaos, you will relent
to the numbing and the tingling
and the nauseous choking and there,
long seconds later, the tightly wound
bundle that is your body, will unfold
like a bat, a torn, yet pliable umbrella.
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, HeadStuff, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other is scheduled for publication in 2019 with Dos Madres Press. She is the current Poetry Editor of The Blue Nib