Lost in Translations

When I plunge into the water, velcro lungs hum
and the island quivers all the way to Etna. Three years
of gentle slumber later, the volcano coughs fistfuls of ash
that glide into the roasting air down Valle del Bove, past
pine trees and orange groves, all the way to the kind shores
of Taormina. I rise above the emerald foam, the sun’s heavy
mouth sucks me dry, skin wrinkled like crepe paper. Above the hills,
evening arranges itself under the quiet Sicilian dust, the clarity
of the twilight melting away the heat. The 8 pm Enna Alta
bus is kindly late. The biggleto lady frowns, beady sweat rimming
her hairline: 1,2 € por favore. Stepping in/out of the languages
requires a shedding of the tongue, a death of the bird in the throat.
The red-eyed bulb of the ticket booth scorches its plume.

Getting better at things

These days, to be a poet
is to parse lines of others
until eyelids bleed ink,
cook ambitiously
hard to name dishes
of thirty ingredients,
high on flambé or julienne,
tend to missing things-
a mother, the freshly-shaved
head, a warm July,
a man who promised
to fix you the summer of 1996,
blame the haunt that hunts you
on the page, in daily workings,
folds of the skin, revised silences,
wear the poet eye in the middle
of your forehead, attuned
to the intricacies of the world,
its healing still incomplete,
no one-and-done flip of the hand,
though it all comes to the way
you hold a knife, neither big
nor small, kind enough to fit
the scoop of your palm,
three fingers always ready
to hold the nib, curate vacancies
on the page, feed the picky palate,
until the eye is sore with lushness.
Then you sprinkle a pinch of salt
to cleanse all living wounds, taste
food, wash away the poem’s scars.

About the author:

Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, she got her MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing and elsewhere.

“Lost in translations” was originally published in Burghelea’s first poetry collection, The Flavor of The Other, 2020, Dos Madres Press.

“Getting better at things” was originally published in Otherwise Engaged Literature and Arts Journal in November, 2019

In the artist’s words:

Born and raised in New Orleans, John Gregory Brown is the author of the novels Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery; The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur; Audubon’s Watch; and A Thousand Miles from Nowhere. His honors include a Lyndhurst Prize, the Lillian Smith Award, the John Steinbeck Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award, and the Library of Virginia Book Award.

His visual art has been displayed in individual and group exhibitions and has appeared online and in print in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the New England Review, Flock, The Brooklyn Review, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere.

He is the Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Carrie Brown.