Five Poems by Clara Burghelea

Motherload

 

My daughter killed me a in story yesterday. She beautifully orphaned herself next to an unfailing father. She then crumpled the paper and tossed it behind her desk in a corner, next to a ball of socks. There is a problem you might have someday, baby. Mothers are known to bulldoze their way into mind and heart alike, their absence, ripe as heavy fruit. My own mother, gracefully haunting every room, the humming of her cracking bones, body thinned with worry, a buzz and cackle when our live wires touch. Behind the open windows, this clandestine sun, a gaggle of Sundayed children and your desk is begging for more paper and pen, eager to feed your thirst for unbinding, untying, unawares it takes a daily slamming and slapping of hard things to occupy the present before crocheting an unravelling future. But I am ready to gift you a thousand deaths, baby, should you need me to untangle the stiches on my belly, one by one, until no bad bloodies your dreams, baby girl, let mother milk run your veins and cocoon your breath, I am here to stay.

 

 

For a while there

You called them pet names and lazed around midday, nibbling on pretzels and apple bites, hands, eyes, breath shaping, crafting, weaving. A mother’s heart, a zipper, done and undone, can make all sorts of things fly, a sigh, a kite, a balloon, time. You can save no one past a certain tilted smile. Off go the braces, next a different kind of metal befriends the skin, some human blur collapsing inward from the touch. For a while there, you had them bleed in your belly and they were yours to hold. Everything is made of labor. Even little explosions called Sasha or Mihnea.

 

Gifting

A mother has a crystal tongue, the spinal cord of worry exhausting all her cells, an animal flicker in the eyes, a whisper for every cold nose, the petalled touch of a cactus flower, when my turn comes, I scar her from the inside, you would think this hardens the heart, instead, she’ll carry my name on her lips, between smile and quick breath, for thirty more years, one day the wind blows her into a new shape, a kite we fly to appease the absence, when my turn comes, I wiggle my toes in my socks at night to chase away the numbing pain in my belly, next a succession of leavings, little deaths or explosions, a son tearing up flesh to grow flesh, a daughter exhumed every year to appease guilt and hang desire by the throat, eat your fill, cradle those hungers, says the man who tries to shatter every sliver of my tongue with his metaphor-laden teeth, a mother knows how to open her mouth into a snow globe, every soap flake into a boy, girl, poem.

 

 

 

That time I got sick

 

I slept for twelve hours in a row

and dreamt we smuggled scrapings

of ourselves into feather suitcases.

Where are we going? your curious

eyes, denuding the morning skies.

Other than the length of this warm

bed, the flawed metaphor is my next

favorite thing, that little patch of

quicksand, and my mouth begging

for momentum. Behind the curtains,

the day boxing light spills, October

sun gamboling in the dry grass, say

you are ready to slumber back into

hunger, and I will hold this bird

of a poem inside my chest, feed it

from my atrium while you wrap

your heart around my naked back,

let them dizzy worries skirt around,

sometimes we don’t die when the day

strikes but before the hand comes

to measure the unaccounted hours.

 

Algorithm with broken search

The vibrating muscle of a Richardson day.

First, in the early oat milk single-shot venti,

later, in the conversational code-switching

Haide, vino să bem another coffee împreună,

it is the little things that whop away the stupor,

the jellyfish stinging of dor in every aching cell,

more coffee soothes, a murumuru butter burgundy

for only $ 2.35, on sale, living on discount joy

in the Marshall’s heaven, measuring unfamiliar faces

always smiling, never catching a glimpse of the bird

in the throat, sewing butterflies with a clenched mouth

while correcting rhetorical papers for nineteen students.

 

At night, a splinter of moon, eyes chasing shadows

in the small room, a frijoles scent seeping under the door.

Clara Burghelea