Complicities by Clara Burghelea

The hours are to be trusted in the rigor of their length.

As the day wears on, skin flakes mark your absence.

The saturated air, then drumbeats of foreign light.

The other day, I found your slender book of poems

on a back shelf in The Strand where the ever-smiling

employee took me when I asked for Romanian authors.

I recognized your way of exploring the second language,

domesticating its feral roots. I saw my own struggle

at mastering it. The way language fakes our many deaths,

the right to parade the best wounds. It was a kind of love,

I guess, your pain trailing down my hands. On a good day, 

I hide down the aisles and let the smell of foreign words

soak up my nostrils before I return to the empty apartment.

Between the snowed-up streets and I, wound as a mound.

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