“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

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

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

I don't know what love is
I just know how to take people inside
with their delicate shivers waiting to be seen
I let them use me like a stranger,
like a pillar, like a craw scare,
like a gentle touch , like forgotten certainty
I undress their dying souls in my silence
I remain in the hurt
I struggle  to spare the blinded of my words
only because there is a girl
I cannot let go
with her wonder eyes
carrying the river of blood
or dreaming of the brightness
of the others might

I don't know what love is
I only know the shape of my heart
with every man
with every woman
I recognize inside

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

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

the song of birds measures the air
the buds of the future are fragile
what a fate - not a rhyme:
the eyelids are filled with light

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

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

"my heart, all of me, this tree
turning its leaves
one by one in the wind

fluttering rustling with the call
of your closed lips

mere light can move it
a touch of light
can make it sing

the shell of our lives capturing
the tatters of a song
: a torn veil, the unraveled loincloth
of a wandering god

these sharp caressing tatters
tongues
of a song"

Ioana Ieromin, from *The Lens of a Flame

“Your silence has been with me and I have let it have its say. I feel, as always, the same closeness to you which your silence makes into a kind of speech of its own.”
Anne Sexton

"and if I remember
you are my memory
and if I forget
you do not fade away"
E. E. Cummings

"Your body is away from me
but there is a window open
from my heart to yours.
From this window, like the moon
I keep sending news secretly."
Rumi

"I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to."
Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

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

when there is no cell
when there is no body
when I am on the edge
you rise
a wave
a sea
an ocean
embracing me
while I plunge

Lidia Vianu, from *My Cup of Light

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

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

This was the temptation:
to rub the I against the you,
our thought against its images.
To feel.

We were there before, you remember,
without mother or father, without navel,
marked only by the first cut.
Free of weight, measurement, destruction
we wandered inside each other, dreamt worlds,
lived.
But the stakes were too low,

the risk — only a game.
Desire was action,
instantly complete.
And that’s the way (remember?) we got here too:
by a single desire,
by a glance.

And now we’re here, in the viscous air,
rubbing this in, with effort —
every single sensation, every meeting.
Our suns rise and set,
our worlds get old,
but here:
suddenly we find
a new wrinkle in our soul,
and this — is for real. It’s real. Finally
we can lose, destroy,
finally we are alive.
For a moment
we can even die.

Amir Or, from *Let's speak you

the soul of joy grows in circles
it glitters in children's cheeks
singing together washes away
the momentum of nonsense
I contemplate the unknown,
the right proportion of light of darkness
their breath kept in balance,
the golden harvest of hearts,
of hours
the fir tree gives away
some scent, some wonder

Merry Christmas

it was not too late for some metaphors
I was trying to sleep
when the air said:
“I will take him from you,
and give him back
randomly
and white butterflies will grow
in your hair”

“he will have himself
that’s what matters”,
I said to myself
while time was left dreamless
and some butterflies
were carrying the sea
to the roots of sleep

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

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

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

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

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

" 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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 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
.

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?

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

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them -

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided -
and that one wears an orange blight -
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away -
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled -
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -
that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading.  And I do.

"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

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

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

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