Poetry: Clara Burghelea

---

The struggle to give everything away

Inside the ferry’s heartbeat, we fold ourselves like prayers,

sheathed in metal, plastic and flesh, part animal, part technology,

it is the thoughts that rise like snapping turtles, rocked by

the Aegean green. I want this to be the end of it, a wounded

winter amidst the very summer of ourselves. As if the scent

of the island, gutty and potent alike, could ease the throbbing

in our flesh, the way we camouflage the blood oozing behind

seams, both, loving smiles, when we call the kids, sweet tongues

prowling, something in us quickens, seagulls dashing at our

giving hands, a cheese puff here, a pretzel there, charred eyes,

these pairs of useless hands, dry mouths, could we breathe

a little before the Thassos sun scorches these versions of us?

___

Everything that ever was

couldn’t make love a habit, just fresh wounds in old bodies

every time I let you sway in your waltzing heart, always

on a sleeve, never holding any shred of conceit, yet ruthless

in its pounding, seductive in the breaking, majusculating

every beat in mine, a giant of a heart, except who can say

this wasn’t yet again another human trick, the small ebb

and flow that sputters and chokes behind the promise of

a tsunami, still blowing us down to nothing. I raise my eyes

to prove it. This stands a hollow house, windows and walls

to mirror the scamper of a dry spell. No emptiness, but weight.

___

Little Bad Dream Charm

I woke up to a soft breath stirring my hair,
what we crave travels with us, it whispered,
in the folds of the skin, the pit of the stomach,
the ink running behind the pupils, the gush of
the verse, the scales on your right thigh,
abrasive to my lips, never healing, the lush
night candied with dream fruit, your head
resting on my navel, on May nights I sleep
naked, daffodils on my shoulders, the horns
of summer poking the bird sound in my throat,
tell me, little shadow, what prompted you to
gently come and sweeten my love-mad heart?

_____

Pleasures
after Radmila Lazic

A mouthful of sweating ink,

A fistful of lines.

A braid of small happiness.

A mother ghost

running besides you, smelling of rain,

April spilling its light over the edges of the day.

A poem picking at its own scab,

holding this rope of silence, flying into itself,

more of one realm than the other.

Your fat palm resting on my cheek.

I hold with those who favor touch, water

and weed the folds of brokenness, tend

to the crevices.

Absence. Fullness. Yes!

_____

BIO

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 collection The Flavor of The Other was published in
2020 with Dos Madres Press. She is the Translation/International Poetry
Editor of The Blue Nib.

---