Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima, Proxima Culpa

Symbols mean nothing if they are not 
tethered to the ground. The ground 
begins at your feet, slips under. 
The ground serves as punishment 
for things flung from up high. 
Bits of paper scribbled with words. 
The brown core of an apple. Your own 
body. The velocity increases the more 
weight you put into your actions. 
Tune in for that splattering sound — we are 
mostly water & at least thirty percent 
imagination. I have never been too 
good with numbers. Being a girl 
has nothing to do with it. My behavior
is that of a predator. Because you have 
trouble reading the signs: the narrowing 
pupils, the quick flick of the tail. 
Doubt what you see & get acquainted 
with my claws. People often scurry away 
when I talk while standing too close. 
It’s the lack of punctuation, they say, the 
awkward spaces between words. 
Hard to distinguish between truth & 
grunt, between whistle & boredom. Never 
too hard for me. Boredom tends toward 
the status quo. Truth is elusive & 
disillusioned. Often delusional, given its 
righteous anger, stemming from numerous 
disappointments. In other words, truth 
is a beast. Hence the claws, the cleft 
hooves, the forked tongue. Broken bottles 
in the alley where truth lands 
on its hindquarters, naked, its whole body 
covered with scars, mucus, blood. It takes 
pain to be constantly reborn. & something 
must give birth to itself; something has 
to be there to catch itself slithering out. 
See how truth interprets the weather 
with its tongue — still intact — that miracle 
of an appendage. The weather 
is what it is: most likely, the sinking 
of things, otherwise known as the fall. 
Truth senses the warmth of another 
body that won’t stop falling 
upwards. Truth knows that swinging 
from chandeliers is not always 
the answer, but how can truth find 
its own face in the mirror, unless 
it stabs itself in the foot with its shards? 
Tell me about your empty reflection, 
says truth. How it tends to gouge 
& crack. How it severs & splinters. 
Empty like a sugar bowl, or like 
the moon is empty unless you 
tether it to your tides or your womb. 
The sugar bowl on the moon 
is always empty. There’s a nothingness 
sitting at an invisible kitchen table, 
drinking the void. You think 
I haven’t seen it. Try me again 
tomorrow — or the day after — when all 
the schools & the stores & the parks 
& the playgrounds are closed. 
Between this closed door &
the next one, I barely have time to empty 
my expectations. Screw time & 
its slow descent into madness. 
Its vertiginous plunge toward dissolution. 
What moment will ever arrive 
when we can sit in each other’s absence 
& be entirely present? Or gladly 
engulf ourselves in the emptiness 
that has become our thoughts? 
That deserves to be written down 
but not like this, not addressed 
to no one in particular, unless no one 
asks for it. Are you asking for it? 
Forgive me for sounding rash 
& unthoughtful — it’s the emptiness 
inside me that is spilling out. 
I have tried to rein it in, keep it at bay, 
but not even bay leaves in a thick 
Romanian broth will appease it. 
No measure of baying at a flaccid 
moon or watching a bay colt sprint 
on the inner seam of the eye. No 
number of elegant windows, medieval 
tapestries, murky bodies of water, 
not to mention those lullabies 
I stopped singing once the children 
closed their doors in my face. 
All I have left is the switch I keep 
hidden behind my Narnia coats 
for the purpose of self-flagellation. 
& maybe as a reminder that not 
all real-world wardrobes lead 
to mythical realms. Fact or fiction: 
I used to empty a chamber pot 
for the queen. I drove once for forty 
kilometers to an abbey without 
a driver’s license. I wore pants 
to church, my head barely covered 
with a borrowed headkerchief. 
I played the violin in the metropolitan 
orchestra, the kazoo in the village. 
I surfed on a river. Come on, you’ll say, 
even I know that is impossible. 
Google it, though. Not as impossible 
as drinking void on the moon, 
which I’ve already shown to be a thing. 
See what I did there? I used my own 
faults against you, buttered your toast 
on neither side. Come clean, admit it: 
I have won nothing, I have inherited it all, 
my own & everyone else’s fear
of diminishment, that air that burns 
as the lungs burn while breathing it in.

ξ

Confabulation of the Self with the Self

Each time I put myself in harm’s way, it was 
to be seen. 
This is a lie. 
No one was there 
to see it. Not even I. 

I put myself in harm’s way to feel —
What? 
Brave. Maybe lost —
Forgotten. 
To feel —  
Unseen. 
To feel — 
The self 
seeping out, the soil
seeping in.

Is this the truth? If it is —
What does it matter? 
If it isn’t —

To whom?

Riderless horse in the paddock. 
Empty boat at the dock. 
These are your words. 

My words?
Ours.
A murder of crows knotting a finite sky.

Metaphors. 
They cast a pall on the eye. 
A premonition.
What is —

The truth 
if not a finite truth? 
What is —                    
A metaphor 
if not the shroud of a word?

Someone has already 
spun and measured 
its thread. 
Someone has held the shears ready for years.

ξ

Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian. Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including the New England Review, Salamander, The Nation, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.