Fine, Then
No one wants to touch the skin
of this poem, its unhatched
enigma. The words sit in rows
like alien pods, oozing deceit.
Truth is rarely the destination
to begin with, but it helps
to know where you’re going.
Or so I’ve been told.
Perhaps there’s a hangar
out there, in deep, airless space,
on some abandoned planet,
just waiting for disaster to strike.
Perhaps there’s a ship, too,
a rusty hulk (given my luck)
heading toward it, spewing
fuel throughout the universe.
If so, count me in. This world
is too tame for my ambitions.
I want to be eaten alive
by a well-read alien.
I want him to wink and kiss
away my title, undress
my metaphors slowly, each
syllable falling off with a hiss.
I want him to sink one sharp
alien fang into the quivering
pulp of a stanza, so that
it comes undone at the seams.
He’ll undoubtedly see his alien
god as he slurps me up, as I
run down his chin in a streak
of quasi-alien gibberish.
He’ll dribble over that last
succulent line, growl how
it’s been eons since he’s done
this, and never with a human.
After, he’ll scoop a chunk of flesh
from his molar with an alien
toothpick. He’ll ask for my
number. He’ll say I was good.
Four Nightmares
It choked her path in the first one,
tall as a wall, wide
as the sea at night. It spewed
darkness, waves of it
clogging the shore of her sleep.
She was somewhere near it,
but couldn’t see herself.
Beyond, was the world she knew,
and beyond it, the world
she wanted to inhabit, layers
and layers of fragile reality
the dream made impossible to cross.
She walked into that wall,
was sucked into its cold embrace
and thought this
is what death must feel like.
An awakening of the senses,
an eagerness for pain, a welcoming
of punishment. It ended
as it began, abruptly.
The sea turned golden, a liquid sun
that burned what it touched:
skin, tongue, the white
of her eyes. The wings off her back.
Small loss in the grand
scheme of things, where no one
believed she could fly.
The third was a bridge, an archway,
an aqueduct. It looked
like a semicolon; she had always
wanted to use one,
but never learned how.
She walked across and woke up.
The room was the same.
The morning light through the curtains.
The taste in her mouth. Even
the face in the mirror.
She touched the charred stubs
on her back, stroked that memory
of having been hitched, however
fleetingly, to something
that could blot out the sky.
If she closed her eyes, she could
almost see herself walking
on air, dark feathers sweeping
the ground. She could
almost believe herself winged.
Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga lives in Switzerland. She is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian, Poem of Arrival and Simple Hearing. Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in Stoneboat, Cagibi, The American Journal of Poetry, PANK, Washington Square Review, and others, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.
Photo by aronalison on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA