Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other was published in 2020 with Dos Madres Press. She is the Translation/International Poetry Editor of The Blue Nib.
Camera Obscura
Plants your mother-in-law tried to kill,
white T-shirt that turns your five o’clock
shadow into flickering dark, bloodshot
eyes that know surplus and absence alike.
Mid-sentence, a raspy Cohen fills the room
and behind the screen, words lay worn out
by the heaviness of your anger. At the world,
its humorless stance, your love for a woman
who’s raising another man’s pretty children,
yet haunts your wee hours with her moans
and you turn bitter, then soft, that stir in your
plexus dies out before the lark song punctures
the dawn and she, an embrace embraced,
slips again through your fingers, scarring
anew those fleshy palms that will go back
to watering the plants, tongue their dryness.
How to turn poetry prompt # 5 into girl power
You can think of your favorite number between five and fifteen.
Then write a poem that has that many lines and takes equal
syllables per line. You might have once tried haikus or tankas,
or take comfort in counting the blue tits perched on red wires,
looking for color symmetry that matches your lopsided
heart, these days skipping beats under layers of sheer gauze,
as you wrangle words, the right words that can soothe, accommodate.
Don’t forget to breathe, stay smitten with the world, sashay along
in your red stiletto shoes just because ankles need to be praised
and bodies still bloom in quarantine, under the nib or good hands.
Add up days spent alone, or nights passed awake, take out excess
charges of light, pellets of unexhausted time, madcap guilt.
The remainder is your bare humanity, caught up between
safety pins and beauty on earth so ripe it hurts the teeth numb.
Fifteen is good enough to seduce the blood ink running idle.
