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the poet
Tara Skurtu is an American poet, writing coach, and speaker. A two-time U.S. Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, she is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game. Tara is based in Bucharest and leads creativity seminars and writing workshops internationally.
the poems
Hum
For Indrė
Are you aching? The poet held my hand
at the edge of the world’s smallest village.
Think of pain as a plane. She wanted me
to forgive what I couldn’t forgive.
Only the side door to the Assumption
of Mary was unlocked—she knelt
at the Virgin’s painted feet and prayed,
and I took pictures of a crucified Jesus
in a fishbowl under the alter table.
She wanted me to love the man
I couldn’t love. It may take a year.
Outside, she translated, word for word,
a Lithuanian saying: “When you fall
down drunk, the ground will catch you.”
My god is no god but the God
of Human Will. I needed the poet’s prayer,
I wanted her to will my forgiveness
to bloom. A bruise is a plane:
I fell, the ground caught me, I got up.
Writing Poetry is Like
Fielding Ground Balls
Someone is smoking in the lavatory
and one of the flight attendants says
shit and she gets on the mic and says
whoever this is will be prosecuted
to the fullest extent of the law
upon landing while I’m writing
I hate ballpoint pens
with a ballpoint pen because
they don’t spray my period-brown
ink all over the white designer jeans
of the gorgeous Miami woman
to my right—which was how I learned
not to write poems in a metal box
in the sky with a 1930s Sheaffer
fountain pen—and I was the one
waiting at the lavatory door
when we all smelled the smoke
and didn’t know what to do and I’d
already been between two bombs
at a bombing, so after being ordered
back to my seat with a full bladder
of wine, I order a whiskey, and this
turns the Romanian flight attendant on,
who winks and gives me nuts and olives
on the house, and by now I know
again we aren’t about to explode
this time, and swallow my nip
and eat my snacks and continue,
with this ballpoint pen I hate,
working on what will, nineteen days
short of two years from now, become
a poem, and we land in Bucharest
and everyone but me claps in perfect
post-communist unison and
the smoking man gets away with it.
Penance
But it was I who held your arm
as the three gravediggers hammered
your father’s narrow coffin shut.
It was I who drank every pour
of your mother’s vișinată, sucked
the liquored meat of each sour
cherry from its pit, swallowed
even the floating worms.
But it was also I who disobeyed
the two saggy-breasted, callous-
handed babas in headscarves,
who, after asking if I knew anyone
at the funeral, scolded me
in Romanian for placing
twelve marvelous white roses
on the grave and not in the village
church, where they’d live longer,
be admired by the living. It was I
who wiped the vișinată vomit
from your face, wiped it from
your arms and hands with my hands
in the back of the backyard before dark.
Daily I wipe everyone else’s piss
from public toilet seats. And daily
I let traitors kiss my cheeks
in public—but tonight,
in my sleep, I’m finally arriving
in outer space. I’m in orbit with
my husband, whom I’m leaving
for no one. We’re breathing air
that’s just air and I want to go
back to our speck on the sliver
of earth out the window, but
this is now and I am here,
so tonight we’re in space
for years, and this may shorten
my life—but what a view!
Publishing credits
Hum: Poetry Wales (Vol. 55, No. 1)
Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls: AGNI
(November 26th 2018)
Penance: The Baffler (Issue 45)