Alina's Adventures

July 22nd, you should have turned 67.

 

The anger is yellow but not golden like mamaliga.

 

Mamaliga has mama in it.

 

Mamaliga can be made into boulz.

 

The anger is not a delicacy handled by shepherds. 

 

Everything we love has been handled by shepherds. But not anger.

 

Boulz comes from cheese aged in bark and the sheep mingle their bleetings inside every bite.

 

July 22nd is yellow and red and orange but nothing is golden.

 

The jewelry she saved for us has disappeared. 

 

She loved gold but the gold is gone.

Excerpt from poem titled "Our Vague and Vapid Love".

Photo taken by Lydia Stefanescu, June 2015.

 

Vague: indefinite or indistinct in nature or character. In France, vague implies the ever-shifting contour of an ocean wave. I’ve never met an ocean wave that settled.

 

Vapid: without liveliness or spirit; dull or tedious. A conversation about the limitless configurations of ocean waves will drift towards tedium.

 

Vague: the expression of unpillowed morning breath reviewing the one-night stand.

 

Vapid: phrases like one-night-stand given the unsettled ambiguity of mornings-after.

 

Vague: a loose line of faces spilling across the city sidewalk promising to wait, the murmur of shuffled feet.

 

Vapid: how much you like me on Facebook. How ardently I wait for your like.

 

Vague: directions by compass.

 

Vapid: a look I left behind, a lost look, the man my lost look makes of you.

 

[Read the rest of this poem and a few others online at Sophie's lovely Dirty Press.]

The Day Before

 

The day before 
you would have
turned sixty-seven
is a sterile
waiting room
doused in beige.
The beginning
is a paisley
print. The
feeling is toes
tingling.

The day before 
is a red
and black
biohazard sign.
But not like
Stendhal. The
trash inside
is potential
cata strophe.

The day before
is fluorescent
lighting under which
only the black
nurse remains
beautiful.

The day before
is unplanned
by the party
no one will
be having.
Confetti is
a fleck
in the doctor's
pupil. Knuckles
crack like
fireworks.

The day before
is a rubber wheel
skidding across
shiny, waxed floors
while the nurse
draws blood
from beneath
heavy-steepled
eyes. 

The day before
your birthday
a color wheel
dies.

Grief etc.

She lounges in a Bucharest park, perhaps 1975.

The Chase credit card company representative was very, very sorry about my mother's death.

She wanted me to know that mom had been "with Chase" for five whole years.

She wanted me to know that Chase, the corporate entity, sincerely mourned "the passing of their family member."

I hung up the phone and stared at the sidewalk. The metal taste of anger corroded my tongue.

There is nothing to say. Nothing I can say to untangle the knots of losing your mother. 

I try to read or write and vowels swim like pufferfish in a 50 gallon tank.

I search for analogies and comparisons... I am hoarse and grief is like a pickaxe dancing inside my blood. Grief is like a rope-less boat bobbing in a harbor. Grief is a color we become when unmoored. When nothing holds us in place anymore.

But the clouds whiff past without drizzling a single story.