why aren’t you tired? of changing clothes, make-up, ribs to torment? sometimes when the night stops screaming I feel you like a blind ribbon stumbling our feet, like nervous fists trying in vain to retain some lilac perfume. I used to pray for my knees crushed by gravitational tales, for my ragged heart forcing the tympanum of time

we try to smile and hold hands we dissolve our tears into thunder until the rain stops breathing.

those days - each a capsule
a miniature of an idea
or an emptied truth
your soft lips postponed
bitter fingers knock
on unheard doors
my blood unfolds myself
with wonder

I can't drag the shadow of
the afternoon light back
into its nest
into the bud of silence -
back to its muse

my dreams have caught
*time fever

words stumble between teeth
this house has pitfalls instead of windows
silence is a stethoscope full of tears
in this girdle, the cage of pain
when the day’s edges play hide and seek
with my drained smile
I wait like a statue of salt
for this faraway yearning
to grow
curseless eyes

the end gets harsh. many of you
now fall pray to doubt.
nobody forces anybody, but somebody,
nevertheless, must give the orders.

the acids have grown lazy and fat.
something more cruel than they are must be found.
if you give up now, if you do it now of all times,
neither the tomb nor the sky will cover you sufficiently.

you are the possessors of the alternative and this is
the only one. that's why i've talked to you about her
in so many ways.
the little that is about to disappear lies now
only in you and in your power.

a black shell pulls to the shore.
i didn't say that everybody is climbing aboard.
but the quiet fright with which we work on the stars
will stop them from falling for a while.

Ioan Es. Pop**, from *the livid worlds

we knock on the doors for them to open, to
let us out, but those on the other side don't hear us and
they too knock on the doors for us to open and let them out
and when they open it's ourselves we bump into
but we don't pay attention to ourselves and we say we want out
and they say we want in, don't take the door away with you,
we wouldn't have anything to open on the way out,
there would remain a blank spot in the wall,
we won't find any way to get out.

Ioan Es. Pop**, from *the livid worlds

I like to stroke your hair
till my hands get electric
free in between the echoes, desires
your touch so easy that
I start biting all the half truths
and stop dreaming about the other side
of the moon
your hot soles without breaks:
I feel like a woman
blessed with
love-days

no doors, complete surrender,
this vibrational mode
listening to the silence of your skin
I offer myself as a curb of melting points
you give yourself as screaming locks

don’t stop tearing me with gentleness
I’ll found myself again
into the liquid mercy in the beginning
the solid idea of us

Hypnotic days
hypnotic nights
our bodies have burnt
all clothes
and several lives

we are
as hungry as the world
as old
as young

our bodies
two motionless stones
in a mountain river

Ioana Ieronim, from *The Lens of a Flame

poetry
a blue snake
stretches from one to the other
it breaks the shop window
it coils insiduously
around those driven
from the street into the house

it binds hands and learns to cry
the utterance at the service of power
don't throw the mantle of clouds
off my shoulders
remember
in the beginning was the word
in the last night
distorted

eventually
there remains poetry insinuated
like a blue snake
into the cup full of tears

Carmen Firan
*translated by Andrei Bantas

can’t speak about you in words but
in the heaviness of trees on unrelated stones
or all the things I didn’t chew
the worm of history froze silent
no axis mundi in my blood but
dysmorphic dreams
your rancid placenta

I can’t speak while
you spin around on streets smelling of flesh
and the layers of time squeeze all the screams of me

mother: the furthest language

When
night fades
a little before the springtime
and of a rarity
someone passes

a dark colour
of weeping
thickens over Paris

on a poem
of a bridge
I contemplate
the boundless silence
of a slender
girl

our
ills
flow together

and how, borne away,
she remains

"Like a black leukemia of stars"
my soul turns in on itself
far more lonely, far more sickly in spirit.

Above, the same desolate landscape
of your dark isolation,
and below - blacker landscapes of black!

Neither the far-off cry of love
nor the nostalgic come-hither of death
disturbs anything within me any longer.

... And only the relentless light ray of lucidity
stabs through, colder, even colder, without mercy
without doubt, without hope, without even a shiver!

Nichita Danilov
*translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Cirstea

ends so ― spiralling after
egg (that other half of our
chains) & setting gills

in gristled knot that buds
legs as tadpoles do & blow-
hole ears halfway down

the back & low-set eye
alien as featherless chick ―
ah we have peered into

that shared **** whose
blasto-flesh runs its gauntlet
of fowl & fish so fused at

the tail nothing can be told
apart ― is this why when i am
late i find in upstairs dark

you ― on placenta duvet &
hunched round self as wom-
bed ones are? ― as though

i had just returned from
all eternity to catch you
naked out sleepwalking

space without even
navel-twisted purpled
rope to hold you

Mario Petrucci, from *i tulips

songs are sleeping in my naked shoulders
he said untranslatable words:
I want to confiscate your lips
aerate your dreams,
and all the rest, you know

I’ve tried my skin today
as if a nest of lazy hours
free spaces I found
patches of unhope,
poppies and
the possibility of you.

joy creates perfect moments
sweet fingers
nothing to take in or out
no shadows inside fists -
I just love how the light rides
the storm of things,
horizons are passing through
my words
and

*nothing louder than the heart

wait

wait
you say
don’t late this day
let it early
away

never

when all my roads
are closing down
you take me to this
never
town

open

you kicked a door open
in my mind
before
your
more

soul

soul is a ball of fire
enclosing memories
which do not
want
to lose the body
they hire

hug

this tired day
at the corner of age
hugging your words
floating in that air
that mediterranean
that balcony over the waves
that
you

Lidia Vianu**, from *My Cup of Light

there are places where no mind
can reach
as far as the gate of winds

I'm counting hours, counting stars
burdened with the exhaustion of difference

see the hand write of time in my silent steps
black wholes in between my thoughts

I can smile, I am in the present tense of home

there are no attributes
in the centre
no spin into the crucifixion of the day

only the tenderness
of the sinking sun

as elusive
as unstoppable
as the Heraclitean wave
around a jug
with the dark void at its core

Ioana Ieronim, from *The Lens of a Flame

read these lines
slowly

let them blow your foliage apart
find your forsaken paths
arrest you
in the whisper of the story before story

cover your feet like freshly mown grass
like the fresh foam of milk
in the dim light
before daybreak

do read
these lines
slowly
locked in their letters and tendrils

as if
an embrace

**Ioana Ieronim

You say: to be penetrated, to penetrate. Sea-sand, sand-sea
verging on the very centre. Words fall between us

like something broken. Listen, I love you.
But you, having it only your way, exist, exist, exist.

You are not being paid for this and still,
Mr. and Mrs. Other, you stroll along the street as if

you’re only a name and have no navel. I
act like you, repeat the movements

which you repeat. Tell me, reflection —
I throw another stone at you — is anyone more actual than me?

I say sand-sea, sea-sand. Like something
broken: a multiplication of faces, legs and hands                 like
something

that’s there. So: enough. Come back to me. I’ll let you go
as often as you like.

Now there’s no longer a difference between us, except this
poem
where some sort of a world lives. Another possibility,

not really different: here, you don’t leave at all.
You don’t stop coming for a moment. I open

a mirror and turn its pages in front of what’s already
written. It’s what you are: sadness in front of the blue evening sky,

anger, insult, longing ******* the blue from your chest
or happiness that suddenly spills in front of the blue of that evening sky;

it’s a voice which accompanies what, looking,
I see now or don’t see. And I see you:

world by world, now by now, one
and yet another one. In this poem that stumbles from page

to page you watch and flicker between letter and letter
and vanish — present in every one of these apparently silent centimeters —

and don’t stop coming, and not really coming. So enough, please,
don’t hide everywhere, talk to me, all of you at once.

Amir Or, from Let's Speak You
translated by Ioana Ieronim

the women burn
their solitude in desolate pans
their underwear smells of blind hands
of running in the sun
of death a little
a moment of silence are wearing
between the legs
these women with still ****** hips
and the maniac blood slowly ascends
into nakedness

all they need is
faith

the poetry of others dissolves me with words like butterflies smashing themselves against solitary windows. flashes of liberty and my grandma's preserve jars get illuminated.
poetry must be freedom, stubborn love-spell. to be in love with your time.
poetry connects me with  the invisible light in my worn out nails - the other me, you and you and him. keep caressing the back of non-existence, the day is new and I'm whistling.
soluble time: poetry or the veneration of the unknown in every word: lover, dawn, pain, bread, together, hatred
let your words be honest, imprudent, rebellious, ET
let your words be

If we do not inhabit our verses,
what is the use of writing?

Eminescu, Rilke, Byron and Mandelstam
succeeded.

Grapes squeezed in a timepress.

If we are not alive in our images
what remains of poets?

Dew and ink,
Labour, symmetries?

Blood is the only colour
That can’t be erased from a book.

Adrian Popescu, from My Cup of Light
translated by Lidia Vianu and Anne Stewart

she has always been much closer
than my palms, my fingerprints.
my prints leave a dam, a stony wail of my being outside in the matter,
but she leaves this dam inside me,
this stony wail, like a secret killing,
she has left her fingerprints everywhere in me.
she is inside of me and I am outside of her, all around her,
the walls, the garden,
the unmistakable halo of the town, the photon crowns
of houses. I am all around her,
outside, one of her fingerprints,
the fingerprint of this dam, this stony wail in the matter.

Ion Mircea, from My Cup of Light
translated by Lidia Vianu and Anne Stewart

closer to the edge
you've never found nakedness
the taste of mirrors
-some turn on the radio-
we need a place full of
not the wrong side of hell
it's years now, it's in vain
to measure the route of light
to the other side of truth

innocent apples have ripened
and you keep excavating time
(love is not enough)

have a taste
there was honesty
in bloom

I am a suggestion
between workings of brain, the solid ridge
of spine ― a curvature
kin to *******, hip, *****.

Almost touchable,
I tender flesh, still, in old acquaintances
who might have been
something more.

To a subtle fingertip
my nap is velvet ― in some strangers
I am a lily’s stem
geisha-cool.

I glow under moons
beneath the wedge-dark, am back door to eyes ―
those hogs of the bone-glint,
of the brink of sharing.

Eased aside, locks
reveal me: curtain raised on my milky
opening night ― or slightly bowed,
offered to the axe.

Mario Petrucci from *love sends itself flowers

silence melts like caramel inside
like an empty-full touch
words travel without meaning
the city indulges its narcosis
all the dumping fights,
jouissance de vivre on the move
and he wants someone
to fill in the blanks:
oh, this is my skin

he carries his cotton touch
on forgotten routes
to vibrant roots
identities combine & depart
some are searching for new pronouns
the silence of silences rejuvenates the city
fresh dreams
new transactions
between truth and reality

and he wants -
fill himself in
and some wonder

let me listen to you
your hidden landscapes
your lives lost
in velvety oblivion

listen to the streams of blood
throbbing at your wrist
in the tender flesh inside your elbow

listen to the vulnerable intensity
in the soft vale at your collarbone

the silence on your lips
the whirls below

listen
listen through you
to these things that one cannot speak

**Ioana Ieronim

you are a stranger, I keep forgetting

forgetting that with you
I do not speak my mother tongue

what do they call it
when we reach toward one another
across the contorted mirror of our senses
and your glance teaches me
that this is the way

what we say seems to relapse into roots
down
down to the seabed that became
a land of many flocks and pastures

and now
here you are
Stranger

caged wings beat in my body
which remembers these things

remembers its winged lightness
of the beginning

when it was promise

when it was
word

Ioana Ieronim, from *Ariadne's Veil

"Here comes the shame."

don't bury me inside your distorted womb
don't leave me outside
to watch the ebb and flood of it
they've stolen everything for me
I was there first, your womb is mine
I dare face the sludgy mornings as you like it
I'm on this vigil: seize the women-wombs
maybe some day I'll be able to honestly
forgive my grunge fists
push, smash, kick the terrible fortress
each of them: you've expunged me
I had to **** the dawn for me
to keep you alive
keep smiling obliterating
the fresh growling
keep myself busy with fear
for you to have clean sheets
in the long winter nights
I'll take it down on you:
look at these secret men

what I cannot feel doesn't exist
they don't exist when I frown my lips
your fat womb doesn't exist
when I grind my teeth

only her can send you under
way behind you
naked

"Daddy! Look at me! Grrr!"
I'll get even
look at them:
unrecognized cocoon-women

only them can pull you under
far behind the level of the seed

"I am you only when I am myself"*
Paul  Celan

night comes like a wave
with eyes full of stones
and your pain is left outside
no earth in your heart
the air blocks the flight when

then
all you want: this old fight
to push everything against the clarity of darkness
push yourself against everything
keep up with the buds of pain
emerging and disappearing
like an unkept promise

somehow
it seems like
the wind in your gaze knows how to
empty a room full of people
but not how to learn new ways of learning
since the mind is a deaf alley
some truths transit the night
to shed their hearts
like stones in a pond
of unknown tears

and
the night comes again like a wave
with blue screams
this stereo pain
this graffiti of anxiety or lack of syntax
and you cannot fill the gap
between self and self
limb and limb
with the (t)error
of having to
die

still
there's much road ahead
and we'll keep loving you
please let the night
carry you
to this strange silence-heart
to some whirlful gravitational words
your own -

I'm here. These texts these sacred carnivorous words
this verbal membrane
(read carefully I summon you read twice!) :
curtain meninx electroshock therapy
blanket straitjacket
bed-sheet ***** placenta

I praise this osmotic verbal membrane
I give you I get undressed I curse myself
Ah! my repressed whorish pathos:
I give you lucidly
Any poetic art is written in ink
(I calmly assure  in public)
in fact
in these mortal neurons

Darkness and dust

These texts these words I've picked from books and streets
Only this ultimate membrane
(precious like the *****
fragile like soap bubbles)
still separates me
from the psychic space where you've pushed me
                                             as towards the springs of the Nile
from the psychic place whence  I try - cautiously
painfully - to pull out:
my hands my paws my brain my heart
What is beyond? darkness and dust
What is left? a poetic art this darkness this dust
these cracking neurons

Marta Petreu
*translated by Liviu Bleoca

Between two ruins I built a house,
between two treason I planted a belief,
between two chasms  I set a table with napkins
                                                            and salt shakers,
between mountains of corpses I saw a saffron
                                                             and I smiled at it.
That is how I lived.  Can you understand now?
                                          That is how I lived.

Maria Banus
*translated by Dan Dutescu

Who is silent now, who speaks?
To whom?
Cinches of lead stifle the lungs
in long typographic nights.
Then beyond. On the blue, chymic flight.
In the space between words, in the fluid and phosphorescent body,
in the eternal field of alien light.

(The dawn which comes. Watery dawn in the diencephalon.
Red triangles dead center in the pupil of our time.
A continuous buzzing upon our tympanums. Excited
thoughts, irritated senses.
And no one comes here, to the utmost floor.
We're not afraid. We've got sharp blades
of steel, of silver, of copper. Delicate necks,
strong nails. Soul fully
at anyone's disposal.)

Who is silent now, who speaks?
And to whom?

Liviu Antonesei
*translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

Stasis, but
              without death
out of the flower, fruit
grows deliberately
you shroud your hearing with
              the rustle
of the poplar practiced at being
               alone

fog like thinly sifting
              sand
hills rolling round and round
               as in a plasma
your other face which, in your departure,
                you forget

the woodpecker
pecks at the house
     of the ancient children

Aura Musat
*translated by Adam J Sorkin and Alexandru Pascu

I didn’t know you were here to stay... you’ve found a place to rest inside this chest. there is no one there, on the other side. why can I measure my life in pain-years?  I am going to listen to the weight of your step... we are so many... poor bodies with slaughtered desires. life lifts up gently like hypnotic steam from raw bodies while you growl inside my bones. you have thorns of truth and short sentences: “papa doesn’t love me”, “mama keeps cursing”, “I am useless”. you are the only thing alive since I insist to lay down in my mother womb over and over again. have me expelled, have me covered in a blanket of blood so that I do not see the future.  you keep giving birth to my selves.
stop looking at me with charcoal eyes, father
look, mother, you can have me silenced for the beauty of dawn

"I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me..."
George Gordon Byron

"The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)
Is not to act or think beyond mankind:
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his Nature and his state can bear."
Alexander Pope

"...body is but a striving to become mind... it is mind in its essence"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"... insight that he in some sort possesses,
A privilege whereby a work of his,
Proceeding from a source of untaught things
Creative and enduring, may become
A power like that of Nature's."
William Wordsworth

"What am I? ?Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth."
George Gordon Byron

"Imagination is a Divine Vision not of the World, or of Man, nor from Man as he is a Natural Man, but only as he is a Spiritual Man."
William Wordsworth

"Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woaful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"That awful Power"..."which unites clearness with depth, the plenitude of the sense with the comprehensibility of the understanding".*  * the creative faculty [my note]
S. T. Coleridge

Hello, brother
God is nobody’s toy
saying hello, the hardest part
while rifles are getting cold
and army of tears are passing through
I know you see this too
there is only one blood
one pain
one thirst for revenge even
same wind
different chill
different bow
different the choreography of laughter
and a patient god dormant
in the gentleness
of hearts

the sea is sighing like a woman
and I can hear its breath
of a hunted man
nearby yellow flowers
wild stones
salt drops stinging my arms
two seagulls dart out of my eyes
and fly side by side
speaking to each other over water
like human beings
in the absence of love

Carmen Firan
translated by Andrei Bantas

(I have to feel this in any language)
to keep the horizon distant in your eager hands
to carefully listen to the rustling of time
to erase the shame from silent kisses
to put your violence in the courage
to be less than anyone have thought/pointed/dreamed
to preserve some hope in between the shoulders
for somebody to lean against
a symmetric desire

what if it's what he wanted?

I'm passing through an autumn day
As through an enormous tear.
A fruit full ripe with perfume sweet
Sinks slowly slowly  to my feet.

I'm passing through the wind and light.
I've never known the reason why
Seasons gone remain as branches
In those unclaimed yet by the night.

Emil Brumaru
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Sergiu Celac

everywhere there was darkness
high above it was dark
                    always it was dark
a syrupy darkness
       seeped into your mouth / stuffed your ears
slapped you across your eyes
you couldn't tell what direction
                 you might move in
a darkness of iron
     over hearts and minds
sometimes we chance upon each other / we shake hands
      with somebody / then somebody else
but the guillotine of cold
   abruptly cuts short
this beginning
the dark / always the dark
                       forever darker
over all things
in the soul / in the mind
on the earth
(the  darkness above darkness)

Cassian Maria Spiridon from City of Dreams and Whispers
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Mihai Ursachi

It is you whom I love today. I love you with all my loves.*
Frida Kahlo

screaming gold and exulting light
I betrayed the sunset today
still life without promises the city
there comes that tone again
in the storehouses of flesh
where life dreams itself
you’ve colonized me
with hate and desire
unstable tempo
my eyes blind
like a storm without wind
I disfigured some light today
its unpretended beauty
no paradox
not even a surprise
I fall for these wounds, your burden
the taste of failure
the panic of not knowing
the trembling of your feet
no need for signifying something
for an ending or a touch
there is love without desire
desire without love
you can call me crazy
if this is all
you can say
at the end of the day

My flesh has become a candle
But I am a flame in a transparent sky,
Like dead birds,
I will weigh more than when alive.

The burning eye feeds on wax
and makes a few hot beads drip down
Once I learned to fly, once
I had proof, but I remember having flown.

My whole body is a candle
All will pass into dust in the end
The flame will melt into the blue
And you will feel the burn on your hand.

**Adrian Popescu

more than a meter away,
I sense the light as if it were a foreign
and endangered thing,
flesh over flesh in flesh under flesh,

and I think that it is only now that I begin to see it well,
only now is it binding as well as it should be,
a matter thicker than metal and heavier than water,
otherwise how could it sink to such great depths?

but what eye clearer than mine sees the light in itself,
with its black veins ready to burst,
darker than a placenta thrown in the garbage,
heavier than mercury when it explodes
and upon seeing it, what eyes will rotate
around it as if around an asphalt bucket?

with an eye such as mine you can’t see the light burning
instead you see its shabby structure,
its weight heavier than that of darkness.
only through the blind and useless eye, you see the unseen light,
the light which rots on Sundays in the yards,
too tired to go away,

the tiny wiry eye flowing after the light
sees what the seeing eye has never seen,
it’s not the matter which is heavy, but the light pressing it,
the eyes that break down are the only ones to see it,
who only sees the light does not see it.

yet who does not see it gathers it in big barrels,
over which they place burdock and stones
and keep it over the years, until it accumulates at the bottom
and hardens like rosin.
one day, in the astronomers’ telescopes
it will look like a dark and thick oil,
which they will use to rub their bodies.

and maybe then the eye, which only brings
bad luck to sight, will disappear.
when he sees with the skin, man will no longer be man
and the religion of retina will have long disappeared.
as long as god exists, he can’t be seen with sight
but then he won’t get away from us anymore.

he is part of the light that
the usual eye can’t see,
yet which my almost blind eyes sees.
from light upwards, things become harder and harder
and while you go up, you can’t go down anymore.
the great difficulty is in fact the easiness,
upon rising, you become the heaviness of the other world,
you crash in nothingness like a bag full of boulders.

man becomes heavy in the other world
because of the light: the venous light
the great luminous Carpathians from under the chest,
the sombre lights which thicken his bones.
who said man is not light?
truly man is light in the unseen,
a clot of lights, very weak ones.
few will be the things which
we haven’t seen because of the light,
this is only because light does not help us see
and anyway I have a bad eyesight
and through my limited glasses
I rather see the unluminous light.
and when the flesh will turn blind, they will also see
the fleshy light because of which we rot.

Ioan Es. Pop
translated by Flavia Hemcinschi

in thousands of aborted silences
of never found again words
in the nakedness of our failures
in the savage desire to be more than
the sight can bear
in the simple recognition
that you know little
from outside
we can listen to the allusive warmness
carving new bodies
for the days to come
for the healing of memory

we opened circles
minds
lungs
to embrace the new symmetry
of laughter:
I laugh when you cry
she cries when they laugh

and they pray:
no more
I won’t be your prey
your substitute
for the undiscovered
truth
take me as air on your palms
as dust in your wrinkles
smile with my tears

when silence is lighter than us
we only want to feel each other
in the mirror echoes
of a patient heart

this simplicity
of being
not afraid
to be caught
with wind
in your pockets

“Johnny's always running around
Trying to find certainty”*

you know this, don’t you?
I only knew you forward, unbearable
when I felt the foam of dawn
on your lips

and how wild fields bloom backwards
in the secrets of wind
in the culture of shame

that helpless zealous boy
with his eyes turned inwards
we are light and fiction
depending on the various proportions
in the geography of sight

we haven’t found out yet
the hidden geometry of thought
I’ve carried around this silently violent lover
an offering to the disappeared
to the void between your teeth

I never knew you

but your screaming point

What,
what shall I do with you?
My gipsy, my fix, my oyster, sea —
only a few spiritual members
gather in front of you, speechless:
my eyes, lips, *****, hands…
— And the heart, my love, where is the heart?
Here and here, and there, my love,
in every place
that your lips touch.

Amir Or from *Let's speak you

today is a bitter day
words are broken windows
poetry refuses itself

people turn their faces from each other
no crossroads for the wounded
looking for their bodies full of warmth
I am alone with my fragile heart
too many objects of perpendicular desire
and no purpose intrinsic to our birth

it's a normal day
some are sharpening their minds
dress up their desire
to use me

today is just another day
the world is devouring its fragments
in the quietness
of hearts

the weight of tears leaves no traces. apparently. pain has no axis of symmetry, but petrifying meanings. everybody must be afraid. there is no point. there is no point in the scream of windows, in the continuity of doors.
in a turbulent ray of light. this destructive force, the orphan desire of a child. its autistic strife. pain, the silent witness of unlived lives. streets keep their rhythm and pretend all is forgiven. rarely is. there are more pains than people. hear the steps in the geometry of desire.  reinvented desire to love. to let live.

every full stop is an abyss of breath.