we stopped believing the agora of the mind
our souls empty rooms colliding
full of amnesia on incessant roads
walls of flesh we were on the edge of terror,
steel confused with clarity
souls plucked like nails inside ruins
suffocated tales & archives of illusion

the shadow is closer to the center only
in the diaries of the blind
no hole of god is dead, we ***** fresh prophets
with inviolable gaze
for the sublime and holy in our sweat
believing is seeing the most lethal duel

the one and only the fake divine
who thinks alone on a road with no views
he planted spotlights in their eyes
for everybody to see only the world in his arms
hate kept in empty milk bottles

life is this schweitzer, passers-by were saying,
it has taste but only  in foreign countries,
with their fists in pain caressing concrete asphalt turbines
as in quick sands no muscle was moving

carboard smiles unprotected against the evacuation of desire
wooden language didn't invent choice
no decomposition of the edges the totalitarian thought inside
the narcosis of time merciless

the clouds lost their sound we still don't look at each other
no hypothesis of sight no discharge for humiliation
wither souls made history grappling bending
twisting nonconsensual reality

no destiny for the allegory of truth  
there are no angles of sight
facts become beasts
holy cannot be anybody's name
repelling of the heart beat

I left my cigarettes today
the same way you leave the departed
I put them in their tombs of desire
their pain had infected me enough
like an invisible netwok of mold
decomposing dreams
my own

my secret garden  
already planted
my name chosen
my path clear
in their hidden mind
I had to love them all:
and I will, always
with quiet ardor,
adoration, gratitude

my secret garden a jungle
of emptiness
denied tenderness
never spoken words of love
terrors and longings,
unrequited pain

for so long I've been
my father's mother
in my hidden soul
what has survived
of me
was poetry

no language
complex
no methaphors
no more tears
for this raw truth
the only mother
for me
was poetry
when
there was beauty
in the sky
so crushing

there was a time when
I used to love your shadow
even in my dreams
and daylight was a blessing
cause I caught your screams
incubating in my left shoulder
beyond the doors
much was still possible
-sexus plexus nexus-
in the trenches where
your silence had died

"Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as an escape."*

I feel like loving you today
like the wind through the willow trees
like broken pieces love their design
I would wear my glance
light as a feather
I would lean against the past
as a girl asking petals on her nails
"now he loves me,  now he loves me not"

I wonder how your love looks
when I'm boring
crazy with seriousness
or amnesic
of the burden of words

Today I feel like loving you
in the scent of freshly made
cherry jelly.
Do you know how to whisper
bedtime stories on my skin?

I think it was yesterday
I saw a beautiful man
on his way to freeing time
letting it roam
on forgotten paths of wonder
as if promising to make the most of himself
that very moment when it's time
to lose yourself

I feel like loving you today
like a mother forgetting her sorrow
like a spare lover
offering a shoulder as a butterfly nest
for your laughter
while you are dreaming yourself
in these words

each morning bird watching
is a silent meditation
I have pigeons sparrows seagulls
megpies in my gaze
their delight of falling
makes me smile
I watch them teaching their wings
for each day
picking up the debris of sleep
spinning around each other
they start cheerful conversations
about the taste of the air
steal crumbs of wonder
from each other
a woodpacker comes
from time to time
its red stain is fun
none of them travel to you
they get round and round
wayching out
their own flight

no residue of the future
don’t know what to say
the contours of words
bear enough ambiguity
mama and papa have moved
their battle inside
my anemia

a reversible memory, you
you’re not a battlefield
with poppies
the blues had just hit the road
to the city
while you were busy to be born
in the quietness of fields

this desire today
with silver teeth
shouted at me in the street:
“you belong to him”

it’s something
to have learned
how to deconstruct
the power of love
it’s a different matter
by your side
in the depths of whispers
in the cage of time

you’re not a dehydrated dream
of my unshed skin
I so elegantly raging
keep up with this desire

my life needs a soul
not to play cards
past present future
heavy in my arms
undiscernable

I am a sentimental girl &
I am afraid of you
of the darkness of sleep
of the blue annihilation
of truth

let me tremble a bit
let me taste some light today
I am round enough

I am round enough.

but I knew its walls ripe with the hate of an ancient dampness
and the ceilings leaking and the floor quaking with hatred
and the neighbours lurking at the windows, to see what happens in our house.

four generations have hated in here incessantly, no one escaped it.
at our house, hatred acts like a replacement for icons,
food and beverage. without hatred,
Sunday pours over as turbid as lye.

in the beginning it was, maybe, just the hatred of one
deprived of love, but later, for those that followed,
it became a natural hatred, a
homely feeling, our title of nobility
and for some time now none of us has taken any comrade
but the one that he or she could hate the most.

especially at night, when the ending is close,
hatred nestles in its bedtime garments, bleeds between the sheets,
all night we turn from one side to the other
with our eyes focused in the dark to the other's bed.

the children have already learned it, know that nobody sleeps,
listen with their eardrums swollen by strain how the hatred crawls,
with the noise of a heavy spider, from one bed to another.
now it packs one into another and quakes, and from them
here comes a fresh smell of frozen dampness.

this nonetheless only for a few months, two-three years at most,
after which their blood
gets darker and the hatred sends down into them a somber conceit
and then we recognize them as being of our kind.

when I was born, I was born for this:
to take the hatred further, to throw it into children -
I do not matter, none of us matters,
only the hatred we pass on from one to the other matters.
we marry out of hatred. we make children out of hatred.
they must hate in their turn, because otherwise,
our more than a century-long heritage will go to waste.

and if we were not to hate, those prepared for it since childhood,
it would spread among you and we must be very careful,
because our regular doses may **** you,
although nobody can be sure that life
is just life.

Ioan Es. Pop
Translated by Anca Romete

I don't know where I'm going,
the streets are intoxicated,
the air pregnant with sweetness
my tears cannot wait for the linden honey
I would go to that place where
time is made of dreams

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,'
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

from **Extravagaria

When I am with you
I wanna lose my center
he would say to you gently
without words

he would translate you into his own language
of groove, longing, shouting, fluid desires
for the sake of  finding his own tracks
his eager mutable depths

he is looking for harbours
for his solitude turned into offerings
for devotion
for the secret wisdom that fills the cracks of night
he doesn't deny the intensity
of the sweet conversations between the hearing
and the touch
he hides his violence in sealed wells,
in clear visions, in the decimals of knowledge

he was a lonely boy
full of wonder

when the silence of leaves comes to me
I dream of continents of clouds, yes, don't be surprised
I dream for Grandma too, she never saw them
not today, not tomorrow, but sometimes, who knows,
when my hands would be continents for you
I'll lend you my skin just for a moment,
just long enough to feel it lift me up and I'll
jump off it like on a trampoline back into
my own burrow - the salty, marine wonder of
blinking thoughts without orbit

poetry, this dear wasting like an unheard music,
the dissolving mint of dreaming
in Nichita's horses' mane
all day long god seems to be combing
the clouds that overflow in cascade,
always ruffled, like the shadows of thoughts

I used to love his dark T-shirts
such that
words in my language turned into hieroglyphs
nor, cer, dor
there were some dreams about
myself as a she creature
who didn't know the difference
between body and soul
endings and beginnings
his blood was unstoppable
foretelling my future
oblivious of all the serious things
like deserted crossroads, eager pensions or
sand storms on Mars

he promised my death to me
like a haiku:
more core less sore
happy woman
poppies in the wind

There flows between us on the terrace
an underwater light that distorts
the profile of the hills and even your face.
Every gesture of yours, cut from you,
looms on an elusive background; enters without wake,
and vanishes, in the midst of what drowns
every furrow, and closes over your passage:
you here, with me, in this air that descends
to seal
the torpor of boulders.
And I flow
into the power that weighs around me,
into the spell of no longer recognising
anything of myself beyond myself; if I only
raise my arm, I perform the action
otherwise, a crystal is shattered there,
its memory pallid forgotten, and already
the gesture no longer belongs to me;
if I speak, I hear this voice astonished,
descend to its remotest scale,
or die in the unsupportive air.

In such moments that resist to the last
dissolution of day
bewilderment endures: then a gust
rouses the valleys in frenetic
motion, draws from the leaves a ringing
sound that disperses
through fleeting smoke, and first light
outlines the dockyards.

…words
fall weightless between us. I look at you
in the soft reverberation. I do not know
if I know you; I know I was never as divided
from you as now in this late
return. A few moments have consumed
us whole: except two faces, two
strained masks, etched
in a smile.

**Eugenio Montale

this flux ripple passage
it creates
structures edges shapes
intermediate areas
transfixed faces:
love or
hums chirps rustle  wooes
sighs sights surrenders
breaking points musings
tsunamis  earthquakes
devastation creation
downfall cries resurections
prayers  longing evolving
endurance & the eye of storms
a touch a strike
the infinite in qualia
soil of oblivion
womb songs invocation
hues of silence
ego destruction murmur
wonder nestled
heart's warehouse
crystal kindness
unknown emergence
fountains
dead languages
renewed light moons sphere
overwhelming beauty
first cry first breath of air
much much more forms
to be turned into
we don't have enough poems
enough air enough shouting
cause horses are in love with the grass
tigers are in love with their prey
mountains are in love with water
pain is in love with stones
love just a reference
and we need to destroy its name
for its true face
this quiet spirit
cosmic vibration
in exaltation

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

'Traum ist des Besuchers Schaum'

love,
imposition,
matryoshka dolls
sore cage-ribs
stories are replayed,
everywhere crossroads with no signs

we cross each other
heads are heavy like pumpkins in the sun
hearts weary of keeping hope alive
I recompose myself within the confinement of sunrise
falling falling further further down
to the anarchy of living
the seduced seducer, the ripped ripper
the air collapses on collars, lapels

we all visit the fountain of thirst
secretly

they still want to learn what love is
the visitors with hurricane hearts and hungry hands
the trainers of dyeing darkness

dog days are over
healing hands are genuine and humble
he finally feels the lightness of the heartbeat

(I no longer look like a fool to you...
yes, you!)

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

it had to start somewhere
Odysseus never came home
only chaos promised to return
the dome of illusion will be (ful)filled
with stones
the mutual game of deception is over
the pride of the mountains collides
with itself
the rise of irony in history
the decay of fists
awaits dignity to play
one more card today
chaos chooses its roots
beneath the surface
inside millennia
of looking over the sea

godless promises await
mundane
a fresh horizon
of pain

Blue nothing. She considered miles
out the high window in the stairwell.
First, simple paper distances her finger

could trace, point A to point B.
Then the more difficult measurement,
that of closeness, like bonded atoms.

And then, hypothetical expanses
like those of the heart's vessels -
their length could circle the globe twice.

A plane seemed to crawl across the glass,
leaving a necklace vapor trail. She believed
in possibilities, that every atom that could exist,

already did, but still, she could not wear the red,
strapless dress she no longer owned,
couldn't lift her hair for his fingertips to clasp

pearls at the nape of her neck, his breath
fastening a shiver between her shoulder blades
down the small dip of her back.

She wanted to look into a large aperture
telescope, to view the farthest reaches
of visible space, where no energy had ever been

destroyed, to see into the incalculable vastness
of him in their living room downstairs, him
on the brown sofa reading. She wanted

him to put down his book, to think of her
on the landing, waiting. For him to move
exponentially faster, up the stairs two at a time.

by Jo Brachman

"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

it must have been the sun the wind
the elation of the singing birds
that I fell into a sweet slumber
in no time I was dreaming
the storms in our eyes had met &
the stones got deeper

when the night finds its resonant frequency
my heart feels like a compass I let her find the scent of your body
let's get lost my hands would say
and let no wind find us and let no why and no road find us
my face illuminated by the song of birds
your face illuminated by the laziness of a sea that only we can see
let's get lost so  we can find each other
in the archive of veins

your words like high speed winds
making noise on my skin
I put on a psychedelic lipstick
I take off the blue dress
(made in India)
- he tries new scores with
oxidized fingers
galvanizes the silence, the thirst, the dreams of the air-
I want to confess iloveyous louder
than the coffee machines. Louder
than the morning radio. Louder
than tram number 5.
life is what happens while
you stay, leave, come back and
redefine our melting point

I open the door,
you are there
with your carnival smile
and nothing prepares me
for this obscure truth:
imponderable I feel
when you say
my name my name my name

the sky leaves traces of light on my skin
the lunar plexus is singing
I'm receiving these images from the future
the missing steps of memory come between  us
do not touch this fiery boundary cause you might
melt me down into a sweet oblivion
it's impossible not to love you from this edge
of a palimpsest full of wonder

in this absence of tomorrow
when only birds turn into flying
I frame the image of you
owning yourself
being here, being everywhere
inside, you
words of thunder you were carrying
breathing in your fingers

my voice passed through you
resting in unknown spaces
I didn't look back
since each day is a child
I make with your shadow

my true self is a blank paper
spring will bring me flowers
your image is so real
between pillars of silence
you keep painting yourself with naked air
under untouched skin

I'm walking blinded in your language
wanting to coin my phrases
like "I can die without you"
or "I need you to love my shoulders"

this is all too strange
under the eyelids
this beauty
when birds descend into singing
when tigers turn into grass
when your eyes turn into silence
and I disappear into words

I am myself
in his encircled silence
lust doesn’t last
only love can travel
with the speed of light

only love can unravel
the colors of time
expose
the silent paradox
of gravity:
to be falling
when you’re flying

falling
deeper
into yourself
while you
elevate
in another

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

on this edge I hear different
things with different ears
the rain in close deserts
the emptiness of hours rolling into
something larger than themselves
your self, my self, their selves trapped nebulae
inside the knife of time carving wise bodies
when the flood of blood gets disconnected from the heart
bodies full of tears recycle the vaults of thought
I am no other than myself frozen in a primordial space,
a shelter for the pain of those I love

yes, the tyrant is ready
to destroy with thousands of arms
with thousands of eyes
with thousands of hearts
a denied collective crime after all
and the old circle of darkness about to complete
again
the worm of history is tattooing our dreams

unbearable the recipe of pain

no real tipping point
especially
no turning point
for any tyrant

wooden tongues speak non truths
to be fed by a tyrant freezes the rivers of the mind

being a tyrant is so simple, so natural in a world we've ceased to imagine

this tyrant like any other free
to toy with history as with plasticine
cause we/you/they are as ready as ever
to support him dynamite
the horizon
of time

We are passing through a blue
period after
a grey period: 'Surely
a green age will follow.' You
stifle your remorse. We are on
our way to
yet
another chance
for tears
in our mother's eyes. Don't you agree? Mothers
enfolded
in the depths -the depths
of land dear
to our souls - where the gods
live
steeped in their
energy. That energy
is proof enough that never, not for
one single
moment, have their hearts
departed
from that magnetic place.
               Magnetic? Of course...
Alone in those lands,
they hang on to their sadness, their wisdom,
while their children
              reach out to catch
                         the golden ring of freedom,
and the risk:

the risk of wandering on an endless,
senseless pilgrimage. Flying
like model planes? Oh,
the thrill
until -
three thousand, twelve thousand
years - they're found, fossilised in sedimentary rocks,
mothers
separated from their children, layers
and layers apart, preserved,
with a bit of luck, in mint condition
(maybe) buried
with all the things that might
be needed in the afterlife...
A movement
from East to West, following
the progress
of the sun. What

was I saying? Oh yes, we are passing through
a blue period, after
a grey period...

Liviu Ioan Stoiciu, from Born in Romania, Contemporary Literature Press, Bucharest 2014

so hard to comprehend if you
can truly be loved as you are
or we simply use each other
like Seurat used light
the jukebox of desire plugged-in
it keeps turning reality against itself

sometimes  I am dreaming, feeling
crying, laughing too much
I know.
I keep looking at the world
with the terror of being alive
with a look that exhausts love
itself

what if contradiction is the mother
of progression?

let me
have me
spin me
hold me
spill me
water me

reinvent me

never leave me
who I used to be

indulging quietly in their delight
the echoes of light are rumbling the universe apart
I leave behind the skin of some days
no light in some pockets full of depth
but cosmos is born in your hands
what a wonder that light rhymes with delight
so natural so wild

what an adventure carries me inside a surprise
what a surprise to feel ourselves emptied of death
the radiance of an imaginary time quietly rumbling
or is it or was it or is it
the echo of your savage lips

A drop of water fell on my hand,
drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,

from hoarfrost ascended to heaven off a seal's whiskers,
from jugs broken in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

On my index finger
the Caspian Sea isn't landlocked,

and the Pacific is the Rudawa's meek tributary,
the same stream that floated in a little cloud over Paris

in the year seven hundred and sixty-four
on the seventh of May at three a. m.

There are not enough mouths to utter
all your fleeting names, O water.

I would have to name you in every tongue,
pronouncing all the vowels at once

while also keeping silent — for the sake of the lake
that still goes unnamed

and doesn't exist on this earth, just as the star
reflected in it is not in the sky.

Someone was drowning, someone dying was
calling out for you. Long ago, yesterday.

You have saved houses from fire, you have carried off
houses and trees, forests and towns alike.

You've been in christening fonts and courtesans' baths.
In coffins and kisses.

Gnawing at stone, feeding rainbows.
In the sweat and the dew of pyramids and lilacs.

How light the raindrop's contents are.
How gently the world touches me.

Whenever wherever whatever has happened
is written on waters of Babel

By Wisława Szymborska

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am,
then I can change.*
Carl Rogers


my hands can be so prosaic
uninterrupted in the mechanism of gestures
mindless, blinded, tired
of polishing the edge of the world

your hands and their delicate shiver
are used to behaving
trying to learn how to grasp the meaning,
the contours of the void in daylight
or why haters hate
(was it your fault or theirs?)

you are an unfinished landscape
of breaking points and hopeless moans,
oases of quietness,  turning points and
electrical paths, buds of mystery
I know nothing about

still, there’s something  teasing
written in between
such is coherence:  a paradox
-two interlocking  unwittingly-
irrational at one level
imaginatively reasonable at another
-reality is framed by negotiation with a god of silence-
two singularities conversing,
filling the air with space  
: it is me⁢ is you
Like when you erase me perfectly
with a blink of an eye
tired or cynical
with yourself,
or when I crush you
like a manic avalanche in
midsummer day

-there is some madness in between-

after all
shame and shamelessness
cannot be understood
in binary codes
while humility and pride
are two faces of the same coin

it’s been written  since day one
this matching choreography of turmoil inside
or just the pursued birth pains of self
-switch, twist, push, turn,
run, hide, split,
break, slip, cut
repeat, repeat, repeat –
the vertigo of life
rhyming imaginary possibilities
new gestures,
new proportions of light
and darkness
in the power of my hands
in the clarity of your voice

we approximate the truth of our last breath
grow old in stories within stories within the story
we tell ourselves to survive the crack of dawn

and so it goes:
the hero decrypting sunset
deepens the story
looking for
some freedom
to be

and I cannot look at you
without
the sonorous light
bearing tenderness
within

I set you free
in my blood
without knowing
if you stay
for today

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the *** of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time

It is time

**Paul Celan

the city looming deeper in its final rays of clarity, the yellow of an embrace enticing like an unknown skin, a flock of dark birds moving like a promise, the feeling of the ****** self, hundreds of years of desire. never stop asking the impossible questions to capture the paradox of life, how much trust we need to acclaim its splendour

something possesses this unseen something, it makes me shrill and tender, furious and ripe. how much disappointment can we bear. I want to be  engulfed by sunset like a fool, I stand with my eyes open for rain to fall into my dreams. love is something life invents to keep its honour, from the stones' point of view, love is mysterious, from the point of view of nothingness, it is everything that can fill the flesh, the empty space of atoms,  a sweet preserve. it teaches us to endure the hidden face of light

at last she no longer possesses me, at last I possess her briefly like a window posseses the clarity of morning  
I am humble, insatiable,  less blind, I am fierce and proud

We are, says everything that simply is

any two people  coming together can be a game/life changer
but without intimacy they are only like
a fish without water a bird without air
leaves without roots dreams without a dreamer
this dazzling carousel of constant stimuli
this attack of never-ending newness
that spins the world is the ******* of  void
I dissapear from thought I dissapear from heart
I am just a message an unresponded voice
a poor sign without the depth of symbol
an avoided truth an impossible commitment
there is no time there is no space for giving and receiving
the most precious substance, our deeply lonely selves
the tears are helpless, here it is, have some void
it evacuates itself in language, oh, language games
played with much innocence,  and eagerness
I contemplate the void in mesmerizing eyes voices words
taking responsibility for  illusions the hardest bit
the body knows first about the danger left behind
by a theoretical love
only by entering the void I can feel it, oh yes
the ******* of emptiness is inside me, too

a wheat field
love
even death
one cannot speak about
without enormous risks

and yet about freedom
freedom -

save our souls!

Mariana Codrut
translated by Adam J. Sorkin  and Radu Andriescu

the night is darker on your lips
my hips are dreaming while
your touch is searching for its meaning

words already written somewhere
in the syntax of time
some waiting to be revealed
expelled through themselves
you
waiting to be caught falling back
into the great wide narrow
open
life gets unbearable
if you feel it en detail
the naked devil in the details
yeah yeah yeah
you are
on the quest for a nymph of the lungs
a never envisioned bride with a maybe smile
moaning melissas not monalisas
softnes curves textures and forgetting
like a work of art
blank canvas for your might in delight
you are also looking for that pain
again and again
more view in between your shoulders
she did it and maybe they subtly pay
the paradox of a black hole
our hearts
fancy yourself
you invent the feminine itself
on the edge of self-combustion
the feast of an unknown body
till you turn into yourself again
and into wildflowers
they taste the magnetic field
its scorch its bustling to give and receive
who gives who receives
the earth wonders

there is earth  in our bones

everyhing has its nemesis
dont't worry
I'll bathe you in my tears
still
I'm writing this poem
with/for a smile
in all fairness

the woodpacker came today
its flight filled with bliss
it flies like a deer
******* in
its desire

I came home pointlessly
endlessly
that day
the windows didn’t confess
I didn’t recognize anything
no, no more
I nailed myself on walls
-nothing really helped-
I sat on my bedside
facing the voracious truth of flesh
while my dresses were exploding
in the wardrobe
my furious love
erasing sunrise
between me and my skin
an alarming desire
happened that day
to clear the view
the life I’d smuggled
and hid away
the sons and daughters of darkness
were calling each other
in my hips
I put some makeup on my shoes
ready to face the world like this
woman
beast
no need to panic
there’s only this desire
unredeemed
to give away
a heart full of dire

I became one
with the other
another me
while
you were
beautiful
like a free day

the unbearable or the body as fiction
cold minds in cold hands and so we have
the remake of the fake
the power of looking and not seeing each other
tears are silent so silent are some words
poisonous smiles and innocence inbetween
"the unbearable lightness of being" a remix
time holds us in its merciful circles
the rest is a mystery, why I love you

but who are you, Theseus, what is your name
behind the name that I call even in my sleep
when there is no memory of the worlds
you have founded
and will

what stays hidden beneath your name that I whisper
with a hunger older than ourselves
with a thirst so fresh in the fleeting moment
that words to name it have yet to be born

who are you to me, Theseus
my lord of many lives
and a hidden essence?

who? the labyrinth of days
shows me a different you
every time I open my eyes

it’s my words that ask, not I

not I who can listen to you with my skin
and can feel you with my hearing,
taste and touch and arrest with a gaze
across expanses bending over the horizon

bridge over the water
cobweb over cliffs
joy
joy over joy

a life-saving answer
maybe
to the riddle
when the time comes

by Ioana Ieronim from Ariadne's Veil

he would have discovered him
trying to change the water formula in his tears
he tried to exist/insist/resist
where no body was thinking
the man without moon
suspended in a terrorizing labyrinth of faces
His own
he was a method man
growing salt in his eyes like minefields
teaching it the taste of the earth
anxiety like mountains of fog eradicating crossroads
he wants to exist inside the body of the world
with the decency of negotiated desires
and the hands get lost in translation
truth is a black truffle
sweating and swearing
sensuous craters perhaps
he killed many singing birds
searching for imagination, his body
muted, renegotiated soon after birth
staying alive, denying the soul of zebras
He lacks verbs, some nouns
learning from the theory of absence
how the effortless U(n-conscious)
is a Poet that
rhymes the body with the mind
of the world

He summoned the shaman, the artists, the tango teacher
to the wake of his body
while learning how summer waves contribute to a theory of mind
his self white
white while forgetting Magritte,
a taxi for Chopin
or the whiteness of the cotton pickers
perhaps

In my house, the sunlight inhabits all the rooms,
which makes me think that I am someone important.
At the window, I fall into the slumber
of the nonbeing of everything I see.

I have only the sunlight on my face and arms. I am sad,
like a man who never leaves his house,
yet knows we live in a world of stones and trees
and has no use for the hastened moves
we call friendship.

by Constantin Abaluta, from It Might Take Me Years, An Anthology of Poetry

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

words minds hearts rendered useless
is the silence of horror the deepest silence?
so frighteningt the force with which life destroys itself
is complexity unbearable unstable fragile?
one cannot yet hear the silence of death
in the loud noise of a world collapsing

Transformation:
one into many &
many into one

the bird of paradise
half truth and half lie
it's not pure fiction
but pure singing
or intensity of the dark light

this vibration of your U(nconscios)
is a floating vessel
(sunk into mystery)
for my dreams
mine is for yours and for her
and for them
this is the way we meet
It's scary and wonderful
to recognize each other
some mirrors are crazy
light hides itself best in the dark
and darkness hides itself
best in the brightest of lights

there are too many layers
of liquid meanings in this
creature called life -
the same way
the ocean is carrying
different layers of
pressure and dark

the bird of paradise
dissolves itself
into singing cause
this is the only way
to meet its music
a bird constantly changing
the shape of its wings
to accomodate danger -
the danger of being alive
on your own
day after night