Three Poems

by Clara Burghelea

Lorca’s long shadow

I tattooed his words on my left wrist:

the angels, the muses, the duende

hoping, begging for its breath to coat

my poems, glaze them with the great

death and longing, the unbroken dream

made of lingering, also, the furl of

heartbeats when my son calls me mama,

later he’ll trace the four letters on my palm,

placing a kiss after each one, my arched wrist

bared and inked, neither shrine nor scar.

*line from Tess Gallagher’s “That Peculiar Open-Air Teeling When You Speak to Painter”

Poem as response to Jenny Boully’s “On the EEO Genre Sheet”

From the way I slip one language skin to inhabit the next, live between places -Dallas and Rm. Valcea- see my kids every month and a half during the academic year, then spoil them rotten a whole summer, our mom is just different, my son explains to suspicious, critical eyes, the way I cocktail poetry and nonfiction, how every Uber ride begins with dónde estás, Clara, how my students smile when I mention my nasal voice and thick accent, self-deprecation always lightens their mood, how I may look like an essay, but I am a flight-feathered zuihitsu, a rough prose poem, always spilling edges, bending form, how in a world punctuated by otherness, we’d better be enough for ourselves, yet we are not, folding ourselves at the feet of the wrong gods.

Speed demons

Calls them, my friend Frank, pulling over on Highway 49

to let them overtake his Kia Sorento. We are driving to see

where gold was first discovered at John Sutter’s Mill.

Once the hurried drivers stop flashing, Frank lowers

the windows. Little breaths of fall, a ripe sun curling itself

behind the treetops, a white sash of bird notes, then silence.

Imagine them diggers, he says, sipping whiskey from a tin

cup near a campfire built hastily by the riverbed, a swift breeze

in the tall night, horses breathing blow damp into their heads.

And I close my eyes for a second and hear saddles creak,

the wet grass across the ankles, the shadow-music of the woods,

and the speeding cars, the Thanksgiving dinner we will be making

from scratch, this week off from teaching and learning spent

with him and his wife feel golden good, and I imagine James Marshall

and his crew of builders, feasting their eyes, at the end of the long day,

on the shiny flecks of Coloma, bright and brittle like most meaningful

things in our lives we watch slipping away, sieving through, soft, shimmering.

BIO: Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet and translator with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her second poetry collection Praise the Unburied was published in 2021 with Chaffinch Press. She is the Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation.