Into the yawning silence
Between thoughts and stolen glances,
love wants to be fed, boil into the mouth
swell the veins down the neck, tattoo
the burning chest and coil like baby snake
into the fork of the stomach. It craves to fatten
inside your body, the ribs of a starved boy
haunting its breath, its face the memory
of a black sea, limbs thinner than moonbeams,
bones eager to be cracked and sprout like
plastic roses stuck in a dusty vase on the black
and white TV, its nocturnal wail crushing eardrums,
this luminous fish of a love, how its good hands slip
like squares of soap into this jewel of slumber
that is your heart. Nothing hums better than silence.
Lullaby
My son lies on my belly, together we are wrapped
in slumber under god’s loose skirts. We bleed
electricity and the fabric sparkles and cracks
and the echo tickles our throats and he and I
watch the winter moon grinning down the tall
window, we steal away its beam, chew the shaft,
tastes like honeyed slivers, no words are needed,
we are brimming with rinds of language, the coin
tumor under my left breast milking my tongue, his,
tuning to the way motherhood grows a third shadow,
hush, child, every mourning shifts into morning.
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 Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation.