Three Poems
Andreea Iulia Scridon
Somewhere between slums and Redemption
When, I wonder, will all the leaves on earth
sway in unison?
And when they will,
will that be the end of the world?
When will my back break
from endless guilts,
like that poor hamster dead at Christmas?
Like that,
sad quiet will hold the house.
Like that, everyone wonders:
Do I know love?
One thing I can say —
I know the feel of fruit
crushed in the grass.
C.M.
In memoriam, pour toujours et à jamais
My great-grandfather lived in the apartment building next door.
The stairwell there smelled better than ours, rather like fresh paint
than stale soup.
In his foyer —
tenebrous,
musty,
and narrow —
three things were of note:
a collection of Orthodox icons
(their glass cracked in the corner, to flaunt age, experience
and the holiness of the fissure above all),
a porcelain Cocker Spaniel, nodding incessantly, sagely,
and a photograph of me
at age six: more Italianate than Orthodox,
rosy and fringed across the brow.
In the office —
books towered perilously,
Brancusi’s Colonne sans fin,
reaching heights of five whole feet.
In the drawing room —
sat Napoleon’s bust, alabaster as mood fit,
lace curtains, breeze-fluttered, tickled him, and he had no arms
with which to swat them away,
nor the corresponding parts with which to sneeze.
Now, whenever the armoire groans,
we wonder if someone lives inside it,
though we know that wood itself speaks.
He perhaps was made of wood,
with a talent for floating
and one for burning.
It often smelled of tomato sauce, made by Mariana,
and, divinely, of thick-lensed reading glasses.
What a clear smell eyesight is:
like mountain water,
like the elixir of youth,
like the birdcage of the sky.
And when I tore the wild grass from the grave,
the earth that spilled out was wet,
vigorous.
The Sud
(in commemoration of obsessive and depressive episodes)
August
cicadas tickle:
gramophone halted at the record’s end,
rain thumping on the umbrella’s roof,
clock ticking on the Singer sewing machine
streetlamp: profane mosquito descendant
of noble moth-moon,
that sweet gelatinous heap of your mind:
daytime you’re tired,
nighttime you’re dangerously alive,
ready to write your masterpiece at the kitchen table,
and
crouched in the bathtub
more wombish than anywhere else
with increasingly narrowed horizons
you go out every evening to hear the church bells
and come back with the rusted iron gate
superimposed on your ribcage,
the suede dove on a wire like a taut whip,
what you thought love
is quickly decomposing,
metamorphosed into an archeological dagger at the throat:
all that was your heart
now lies beneath the Mediterranean Basin
Blessed Virgin,
now helpless pale-faced vertigo
you’d like to take off your nervous system
and hang it up in the closet,
walk down the street like a brute,
your stems are growing in wrong directions
but the papier-mâché mask mustn’t crack,
the farce renders you
an imposter-genius
when you get home,
you’ll stand in front of the house
even if it’s past midnight
and look at it and tell yourself
that it’s good,
that what was worst has passed
and you’ll touch the storms
that have ravaged the past few days
with the finger-pads of your mind
and you’ll climb the steps
and press the doorbell
and your grandmother will open the door
and your grandfather will be in the hall
asking if you’ve arrived
and you’ll have a tomato for dinner
and everything will fester with normalcy
as it always did
what else is there to do but go home
once you’ve reached that premature Rubicon?
Sadness, like a sort of sex,
melts over the top of your head like honey from the skies
your left ovary lets out a lament
as if threatening to cry out like a child,
from hunger or tiredness,
and forgetting,
when it arrives next to the night-lamp,
has,
like death,
the sweet face of a child
Andreea Iulia Scridon is a poet, fiction writer and a translator from Romanian to English. She studies Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, and previously studied Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Currently, she is assistant editor at Asymptote Journal, where she also writes. She has published in World Literature Today, the European Literature Network, and elsewhere. She writes at www.aiscridon.com. “Moonstone” is part of a larger collection of poems on the state of Florida. She is a contributing editor at E·ratio.
