they were deep like roses. like leaves*
the thought is blowing them away. remember
how much death we are capable of
and how much earth there is in the sky.

bu they are deep like roses in autumn.
the leaf of the hands sighs as it falls
like a bird on the mediterranean -
exhausting the light of the waters.

still, he was saying, there is too much snow.
winter snowed through his mouth.
it too did not let them see each other any more.
it fell on their hands and put them out.

Ioan Es. Pop, from *The Livid Worlds

sitting in my living room
white socks against red carpet
my sleeping toes testing
the cornerstone of morning
dawn’s hoot woke me to daydreaming
and voila

I’m sitting here
awaiting for a fresh poetic tide
to tease me from the home box:
would you like some poetry for breakfast?
how about lunch?
meet me at dinner
let’s have a poetic feast

before time roller coasters
start screeching the duties of the day
musing on new wonders
in the avalanche of gestures
or before pushing the night to its limit
I enter the maze of your words,
you strangers with poetic souls&bodies;&mind;;
longing to vibrate as one
starving never to conclude
floating restless, incomplete
in love’s amniotic dream

I go out on the door
in the colors of your thoughts
fierce chain reaction
giving is receiving
and all of a sudden, unexpected
my heart would open up to itself in a smile
through distance and time
some unknown kindred soul
has been smiling back at me

I wonder how this can be

it must be Poetry
let it labor upon me

the heathen hours plunge neighing
into something
struggling on my lips
I am looking for my blood
how it knows to explode
the salty earth is my sister
something rounded
dissolves yesterday all over
the crest of sleep brings you to me
whole
full
enraged
with desire

don't peel me off you
that's all

it has been a fire journey cause
your legs carry the regret of a volcano
a water journey since
tears have memory
an air journey cause
my sighs are filled with oxigen
it has been an earth journey since
tumbling lights fill my words
when I deny you

when
I dissolve myself
into you
I become Babylon
anew

bold and assiduous like a young hip
our glowing silence tears the air
the unconceived truth of blood
you wander around my chest as if in a
procession towards the delirium of spring
my wrists have no dream to hide
the eyes confess: falling skies are crushing
stone by stone the world in which you didn't exist
my body buried in light
an orderless language, the rest is details

I must confess to you that the death problem
made us sweat:
Our old school teacher,
Miss Barnovski,
whom we used to call the Duchess,
set us two enigmas — you and I.
She wrote on the blackboard — it was a splendid autumn
afternoon —
the radical of you plus the radical of I
is zero, and got out of the classroom
leaving us alone with our queerest thoughts.

Nichita Danilov, from *It might take me years

time bombarded me wiht its silence today, the sky was closer, birds more transparent. maybe because of the intersection of wonder and scream. once I was one with my wounds. I had thoughts without spin today, only the wounds of the world spinning in the distance. the impossible mixture of blood dust shattered bricks, death is so ignorant, so messy. you used to smile when you saw me eating blueberries naked. in the core of trees there is silence, isn't it? in the core-self there is an emptiness full of antiwords, isn't it?

we are targets for light, for the precision of its
unknown aim, yet we insist in blackening the world
as a self-described pyromaniac, I practice daily rituals with your presence. I tell your name to the wind, to the sheets, to the cup of tea,  to the orchids. then I tell to myself who I am, who you are.
outside the world is drowning in its own guts. your name is incomprehensible, but not to the rituals of the heart, they defy gravity, brevity and bribery. Diffracted on the psychic field your trajectory is eerie, the amplitude of some waves enormous, as I watch them wash the horizon away. dreams are the only shadowless creatures, and still I dream only your shadow. we still don't know why beauty is truth and truth is beauty. oh, happy rituals of the hands: inventing love, writing poetry.

there is a growing light inside, a young hour,
a raw sun falling down from everywhere
spring is near, birds are alluding
I'm sitting here, watching the air passing by
in this full emptiness, a joyful wonder
Karunesh
a god of compassion is looking after the alluring violence
in bloom
the patience of spring, uncomplicated
carries me somewhere
into laughter

don't rob this moment of its nakedness
better distill words
to the strength of this feeling
don't touch the sleep of children
future might turn back in rage
it's majestic
the way temples are erected
inside mitochodria
it happens unintentionally
Borges said it
beauty as a physical sensation
never mind being wiped out
new roots/fingers/words will grow
in your wrath
the vibration of thousand mornings
will not suffice it
(don't confuse pleasure with beauty
or make up with follow up)
if god were a sensate being
I would kneel
in front of a sea with no paths
I cannot explain
what the consistency
of your bones
means to me
there is no way
more simple than this:
what if beauty
is?

Who else could I be than the collector of wounds
yes, gentlemen, I came here to buy
some of your hidden wounds

no, gentlemen, the hideous scars are no more of interest to me
I now collect more sensitive wounds
secret traumas
wounds passed down to three generations
pains inherited at birth
thin cuts got at the time when your feelings took shape
anything that disappointed you at birth
now this is what interests me
the first interior drop of blood
the first words you pronounced
but which never ever healed again

Matei Visniec
translation by Anca Romete

to get my hands ***** with miracle,
to be fed with unknown, quietness, outburst of laughter
to carry me like a bridge into nonexistence
to make me a violin amidst misunderstanding
an imperfect piano in Chopin’s musings

to confuse me with another
spewing me on a distant shore
to bear my craziness of walking naked
among suspicious warriors
to teach me a prayer for each & every
breathing day
to take me to the other side
inside

I want elongation & annihilation
the practice of martial arts
in the truth of uncertainty
to invent distant words for the violent joy
of being alive

I want the little things
filling the imperfection of the day
like the warmth of your socks
my hand finding your stubborn lips
the forgetting of your tired shoulders
the softness of my whispers sometimes
my shoes next to yours wandering there
where something always happens
hic sunt leones
the shape of your thoughts in the bedclothes

I want to fall from grace
to love the weight  burying
me in this round-about,
the hymn of my blood

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

You cannot be sad, you cannot be bad, you cannot go far, you cannot subdue the pain

Can I like pink? The color of the flowers, of the irrational happiness of a child, can I like pink?

You can like blue, the color of the bruises from when your unremitting mind hits your body, you can like blue.

Let the little boy run, said the stranger. Let him go and don't fear the danger, the unseen, the unpredictable.
The mother fears, she fears herself without the child. She keeps lying to herself that when the moment will come she will feel free to do it, God will let her now when the moment is right.

The days are from yesterday not long enough to keep this unsettled mind straight. The minutes cannot embrace the impatience and still touch hands. The minutes are now so far apart that they cannot find themselves in hours. The day breaks.

I am playing with the minutes, with the hours, the little boy laughs.
- We have no time, carry on, we have no time, the mother said

The time, teared apart like the petals of a flower ripped by an insecure girl in her boyfriend's love, the time comes together again. The boy has stolen some minutes, so he can play with them later. Hold on to them and laugh whenever you remember your secret, said the stranger.

The day is shorter. Now. But some of us have the time to laugh.

I will hold on to my minutes and when nobody can see me I will wear pink.

*the author wants to remain anonymous

"Every teardrop is a waterfall"

there is something in sight
some layers inside
the pain of worthlessness
under hatred
corroding the scared ribs

there are acts of seduction
in every corner of a smile
to undress the dead
from theirs spirits

there is the specter of ******
screaming in between the shields
tempting to posses life itself

tenderness is a foreign language
in the cravings of the night
or this is just the long way of love
waking up the leaving

there is something in sight:
the day working against itself
while somebody is learning
how sweet
it is to hate

but life is not that complicated
when you love
what you hate

but I fill in the blanks of thought with black panthers
they watch you closely as days lose their names and time moves in all directions
no ordinary dreams in the present continuous of flesh
but some flashes of certainty:
the colour of my tears suits you well,
distant is the moon from its own doubt

Speak to me of the wave of longing
That broke against you,
Pressuring your forehead,
Narrowing your narrow street,
Beating on your palms,
                                         America.

Your eyes remain unclosed,
Looking-glass and sea,
For the dream with claws.

Fairy bird,
arching bird,
Sweet enchantress,
Envied by throngs.

"And you who ask about me everywhere,
By now don't you know that I am death?"

Flavia Cosma from Wormwood Wine
translated by Don Wilson with the author

Go into the woods
and tell your story
to the trees.
They are wise
standing in their folds of silence
among white crystals of rock
and dying limbs.
And they have time.
Time for the swaying of leaves,
the floating down,
the dust.
They have time for gathering
and holding the earth about their feet.
Do this.
It is something I have learned.
How they will bend down to you
softly.
They will bend down to you
and listen.

Laura Foley, from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

has the temperament of high waves,
the character of raging winds
it can read the bones of the sky
it can be as quiet as unused ovens or
as the light over the hills after the storm

a woman's passion invents new remedies
but no desperate religion of salvation
for the curse of being bodies full of time.
it doesn't accuse you of the insolence of being yourself
no need to use blood metaphors in this poem
cause a woman's passion simply moves the air in your blood
so effortlessly that all you might want is run away and
die again and again

You-the night-the day
she-the day-the night,
or just the fair pulse
somewhere in the air the hollow howl

She feels it in her bones. Yes. She feels
whatever shall be: a blinding ambiguity
The morning recycles dreams.
laundry crushed on the river stones
women are crying and washing
Oh, she wishes to air the night of your body,
to pull you out of your death.

The shadowy flowing of now
pierces her eyelids with your cellophane smile
her cells rustling: you-you-you
even screaming like a yo-yo
to be heard backwards
till the Big Bang

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

a liquid heart is hard to bear
even if I shout no body hears
how many we are
lost in the structure of tears
this pain that I let in like a love decree
a wave like a fist dressed in impolite velvet
how to survive hating unresolved
the other side of everything is pain
in such a world of beauty and dread
absence and seduction rampant songs
and acid hands

a cycle revolving evolving
it disappears from here if you push it out there
I am talking about pain like a broken doll
a cruel fate left me without eyes so that I can see
only what I  feel
pain in all aggregation states, a true substance

a radiant promise in a vacant smile
I am trapped inside the circle
of the moon perhaps
at the hour when a great nothingness greets you
a neon sky a synthetic civilization
full of fascination as any other
we begin to live again
with some honesty, some regret for the divinity
of a blue death that possesses our hearts

In my arms - thought - my words
you are malleable wax, a diamond
that reveals itself. Light of the tunnel, you!
The pyramid catches hold of our hands.
We become transparent, we become translucent.
Alone. I come near you ascending from time's
shadow. Free, free from everything and alone.
Above the city - fiery halo -
bodies float void of fear. The future
becomes present, the present, hope.

Liviu Antonesei
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

as long as it's night here
over there it will be morning

great things will be said tomorrow,
but not as great as for the world
not to remain the same.

you brought keys bigger than the doors
that must be opened.
there is so much noise behind, on the corridors,
and how little one can hear here!

maybe we advanced more than we should have.
maybe the last in the line have found the exit
exactly where we came in.
maybe, pulled away from the hinges,
the room took off away from us.

and we put keys in left and right
search for doors that don't exist,
we insist in not ever raising our eyes.

where shouldn't we have entered? from where
shouldn't we have gotten out?
the friend says this summer will be long
and that the wars will be put off again,
because birth have been again
too few this year.
therefore once more will remain only the war against oneself.

now, good night. day breaks here too.
the room drew back from us long ago,
and we keep groping even now with the keys for the doors.

what are you doing? you put your key between my ribs.
you wanna get in? are you struggling to get out?
or only to open and nothing more?

i told you: outside it is summer and it's sunny.
outside there is no longer what you thought.
get out of my bedclothes, i come from hell
and my flesh is burning with horror.

Ioan Es. Pop, **The Livid Worlds

I’m writing in this language
to forget about myself
to spit out the caffe latte
my mother’s milk
and my father’s  coffee

the mind has diamond edges
virtual slopes
the body is a jungle
writing to me is like
writing to you

I’ll let go
of the spitting image of you
of me
no slogans
no slop

you are some unfinished poetry
in the unwritten me

when I close my eyes
I can see the trees breathing
when my thoughts have the rythm
of a gentle rain I can feel the
terrible pain of the sun trapped in its orb
the indifference of the coffe machines
how there are still dreams in retirement plans
the pulse of life rhyming with death
just see the world population clock,
the pollyanna sindrome, if necessary
oh, this whisper in the essence of void:
what a bliss to be round around
the prismatic love that warps the edges
of time deeper and deeper
into its hidden curves of wonder

how many people do I hold in my breath?
how many lives in my veins?
I do go gently into that good night
(thank you Dylan, meet you there)
To my good aged mothers
To my good aged fathers
To unfold the creases of time

Blinks of eternity they were
Carrying the weight of days
So that my tomorrow
Can be

At dawn the earth gently curves
Giving darkness a name
And I bent over the horizon
In a heart reverence
To my good old mothers
To my good old fathers

Their curses  sculpted the clay
Which I tread on
They planted  their harsh truths
With eagerness, with tears,
With oblivion or patience
And I wonder how the wind
Touched them
How the dust molded
Their wrinkles
How the darkness hid them
From themselves

My mother had a mother
My father had a father
They were young
They were wild
Their dreams ripened
In the sun

And then…
Their living gods
Their violins accompanied
By failure
Their praying to the sea,
To the rain, to the springs
To the sweetness of grapes

Their bones sing in my dreams

It is their right
To be touched
by the waxing
and waning
of time
and love cannot be
without
Innocence

If the soul were a cherry, you'd squish it gently between your lips with a smile just for flavor. That's just sometimes. You run through my sleep, create a new dimension. There I see you,  taste you, smell you, I lie in wait actually. Or watch over you,  my pure emotion.

my hands are full of waves, walls, kisses, common faces
a shamanic design sometimes
but they still can't bear the weight of words
in a language without wrists

I am a Jane Doe on a metaphoric journey
cause time isn't waiting for me in particular
so I won't waste any more minute on the description
of the darkness of language
better start writing the memoirs of the time to come

" My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief."
— Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

they say it's the limbic system
I say it's the earth of my brain
and you are here to stay

from the fifth floor you can see better how people
grow older, you can see or choose not to see
the world like an eruption
in the night I sing and bleed a little
I explore the memory of light on the skin
there is pain and an envelope of laughter
there is the concrete shape of things and the shape of babel
the other-me rehearsing faces, bodies. alphabets, the taste of love
who decided we are human some believe love is like a full stomach
i would love to remember when i was a single cell
a coded fullness hallucinating me, hallucinating you
she has a beautiful smile when it's winter
and you love her. the story encircles you
we can choose to see the world with sincerity
my ashtray is full of dreams and I won't stop dreaming
you'll use the same soap as her and you'll even write a memo to yourself: love can be so hot in the middle of the day
I'll write in my diary: let's see what I can forgive myself for
somewhere inside there is a feeling waiting for another feeling
there are words waiting for more words, for only the words
can point to something much more free

Too many days come seek their past within me
I reach out my hand towards your face and it draws back.
I reach out my hand towards your heart and it stops.
I mustn't speak.
Who knows what secret code
what signals meant for death
I might disclose.

And your face.
And the vision of this hand.
And the way you're removing yourself.
And the image -
vertical as a scream.

Carmelia Leonte from *City of Dreams and Whispers

rainy days like these
I fill them up with
tenderness,
visions of the unknown
like lymphatic vessels
roaming the world
just to keep myself
from not knowing
that even the gods are weeping
or hidding their cries
in unwritten stories
when the pain is so
so so so so so
alive

what a blessing
what a chance
what an accident
a wonder:
the horizon itself is in
transition
to something other
than the blue speed
of the earth

“My wound existed before me;
I was born to embody it.”*
Joë Bousquet

No anaesthetic rhyming with aesthetic for the cracks of words now **** it! This pain keeps inventing skies to fall into, glass screams, corroded nails Crying comes from far away Words grow flesh Between fingers Herds are trampling on my heart inside plastic horizons This stupendous silence then Take my bones from yesterday Future is a catapult What if I am only a girl facing this      Breathe out

I am the possession/oppression The oppressor is me Pain is not a stylistic experiment Where can I hide my ears I crawled I bent Disfigured I had to pick up my eyes from fences, my lungs from the mirror I have a body full of used words, slapped doors, walls swollen by silence Hope to get used to be treated in the third person No poetics of space Pain is this quarry in me L’habitude of memory

i am not stable
i am not wild
i am not simple
i am not mild
i'm only dreaming
about the mystery
i received
when i was born
a child

i am not yours
i am not mine
i'm only a letter
in the alphabet
of time

“The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”*

to O. F.

Maybe your soul is a kite right now
as I am writing on the kitchen table and
winter orchids are  earnestly blooming,
May you be peaceful in the final womb
Dostoyevsky wrote about you, the humble one -

There is a hole now in the shape of morning
I can't find you smelling pears anymore.
Only my eyes filled with dust over your casket
You hid your dreams so deep,
devouring oblivious dreams
She poisoned her milk and
that's how you learned to deny
all the streets you never went.
spring sun used to find you listening
to the solitude of trees, while the seasons were recycling your shyness.
Somehow you didn't notice the light slowly descending
into the green chaos, or just the old mundane hatred,
the embrace of a disavowing (d)evil.

- this poem could be full of the noisy blindness of life
of crushed dignity and helplessness
I want to find the right letters to write
only two impossible words: pure heart-

Farewell delicate soul,
You have died enough
.

Silence as of one million closed doors
bestow powerful illusions upon loneliness,
it lights up the memory of its sons
even before they are born,
it carefully razes
the trees in which hamadryades slumber,
shut me up inside
the being that I am - so I do not know what I am -
and throw a light for all time
upon the moment of my death

Ioanid Romanescu, from **Magic

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

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

feelings
like lizards

like she-wolves
with their eyes of ember
in the dark

motion arrested
waiting for the mind to reach
its hypnotic body

**Ioana Ieronim

who knows if we trully own our words
or they own us
too many sunsets and dawns are happening in the same time
and the departed are tormenting us with the song of their flesh
I found a rhyme in you
absence rhymes with presence
somewhere in the hands of time

my hand in your hand is jazz
the knot of our tender looks is poetry
and rage sometimes
all details germane,
this fluidity of desire passing through
the unexpected like sheets of rain
the kiss on my shoulder
the lightness of your soles
a love without name without shame is improvising
and you say come and I say round until I fall into your shadow
and when I fade away you open the door of a song
in my palms the forgotten synesthesia when
I listen to the intensity of cells, to the sacredness of dreams
I wear the boldness of the earth for you
I swear the freedom in the core of mirrors

because of sadistic hands
we grow bigger hands
to grab, pull, squeeze, pierce
every body has its dread
darkness is pushing the boundary
pushing us against the volcanic
visions of the depth while
looking for its light or its
might
who knows

A slight confusion
of earth with water
of water with sky
enough for life

to be lived

**Irina Mavrodin

to be
or maybe just
trying to be

to be or not
or yes
or like you were without truly being

well
let it be...

to get in
or sometimes out
of your own mind
as if you would not even care about exuberance or sorrow

naught or infinity
nothingness
endless

to lay/to stand
faling into a slumber is like an upside-down waking
one sleep with many dreams inside

a single step more or one less
in open space or hidden path
not knowing everything
nor nothing knowing about
yourself

down here all seems to be
strength/weakness/happiness
falls or rebounds

to be almost at all
or only to-cease-a-little-bit-to-be

light/abyss

finally
all seems not to be anything than always the same shamelesss
swollen from so much foolish tension/internal/but eternal/rather
flat/mat/fat/and mostly incorrigible
                                                    ­       "This is the question"

by Gigi Caciuleanu, from "Miroirs"

you really believe we are not more than we are
at the table or in our waking-up gestures or while we throng
in the morning in front of the newspaper stands or in the long autumn evenings
when we come back home with the same and the same movements
down the same and the same streets?

those from tomorrow will stop asking this question.
but us, now and here, isolated by the language which will put an end to it,
it's in vain that we dug with our fingernails into the mortar, in vain that we've stood
glued to the walls: from over there not a thing could be heard -
in the blind alley of our speech the answer can't be worked out yet.

and only seldom have we opened our eyes and then merely to see
how there are poured over us as if over coffins
tons of unknown. and right then we closed them back up
quickly and we said it's not true, we are still alive, i still am alive, he lives
he lives - i touched the one who was lying next to me
he is alive - he turned over in his sleep he laughed he sighed.

you really believe we haven't been heard in any other room
which we didn't have time to enter?
either the room was not yet walled up or nobody lived in there yet
or those who will come to live in it will show up too late or
were there but didn't hear us when we knocked on the walls or others
knocked on the walls too then and they alone were heard
or we didn't notice when we stepped from one room into another
from one basement into another or we didn't want to break down the walls
of the last room out of fear not to, or we couldn't imagine that beyond
that basement there could be other rooms, lit other than by
this lye pouring through the cracks of the back door
or the front doors were not yet walled in and no other
room was yet walled in over there -

then we rushed voraciously back upon own body,
we went downstairs and pulled furiously the trap doors above us -
in a fury as if in a province of self-forgetfulness
as in the womb of a woman from which we shouldn't have ever
come out.

Ioan Es. Pop, excerpt from " you really believe we are not more than we are here", **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

when the body speaks
words don't listen they simply go crazy
like the oceans of a foreign planet
why is that you may ask
why is a smile full of ranced linen
why is a mouth used to nibble the cuffs of bitter hours
why is a heart so full of lightning energy

what can a body do with the pain she was given
what can a mind do with the multiplicity of truth

poetry is a visitor from another space
where a blue scarf is waving in the wind
where everything exists all at once

while fishing the stars
in your window
caught my skin eavesdropping
these rhythms: it must be some truth
I came along ahead the cortege of my selves
straight from
the blues of morning

tonight is simply beautiful,
I'm just saying,
heaven & hell
one metaphor away