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the poet
Born in Romania and now living in Birmingham, Alabama, Alina Ştefănescu enjoys life with her partner and several intense mammals. She's the author of Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize, and Every Mask I Tried On, winner of the Brighthorse Books Prize. Alina has poems, essays and fiction in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, POETRY, BOMB Magazine, Crab Creek Review and elsewhere. She serves as an editor, reviewer and critic for various journals, and her most recent poetry collection is My Heresies.
the poems
Arianda’s Ninth Letter
to Her Father, Scriabin
No. 9 in a series of seventeen
Eclatant, lumineux,
Ariadna no longer – I changed my given name
to Sarah, and reclaimed the mother in my blood.
On a bench in Toulouse,
I nurse your granddaughter.
I lose my place on this page.
My ink stains her shirt with a flurry of clouds.
My darkness marks everything it touches.
Of all the wounds I’ve known, the worst sound
like the drowned and smell blue as the ocean you
adore. Long after the water devoured
her little brother, a young girl remained
on the shore. I tried
to memorize the shape of lightning pouring fury in her
words. I left my name but kept the nightmares of storms.
I smoke in bed while writing the novel I'll never
finish ...
Father I am losing
the thread
I am comma after comma
refusing to end
on the untuned
organ
in the cathedral
of your orgasm.
What matters is an echo's abundance.
Immanent rebound. There is no
single ending
to sound.
On Love as a System
of Bewilderment
For P
Plankton are small, feebly-swimming
creatures located inside an ocean.
You are the light of the world,
dear man, you are the wick
in me. This is a collect for purity
with diatoms for eyes.
Oil is lighter than water.
Toes are lighter than tummies.
The sun rises with hidden
ropes each morning.
Marine life is sorted by lifestyle,
whether bottom-dwelling, top-oriented,
or dogging the middles of all I can’t
think when faced with the slot-based
ecology and my failure to niche in it.
O you are stunning when swearing
it’s easier to be from anywhere
in the abyss. You are the light of the
world and plankton is your bitch.
At the mercy of tides for transport,
plankton is wary. You are the light
who says holding my breath makes
it harder to control the line’s width.
Yet I am your favourite lyre when lit.
Apostrophe to Scriabin
Now let the azurine swallow my vowels.
You who spoke of his mother in chords— compose her
again for this horizon.
Life is music, says the user of muses. Life is
scattered to stanzas, murmurs the muser who gives
the world she imagines to them.
To the named and the numinously nameless.
On a beach in Alabama, your mother’s laughter
lifts the latched eyelids and I wake into you, Scriabin,
the infant who loses his own prior to speech.
There is that land before language and it is endless as the laughter sunk into lilacs.
A boy knows what he owes that shadow.
The medium entire. The pianist who birthed him and
vanished. The salted air trolls my hair
with its fingers: a rearrangement as violent
as the rangeless transcendence. The tone of your oceans
in an orchestra dangling from the whim of a falcon—
like a child who scales the tallest tree
to watch the yard burn beneath her—
the image seeks to rise above
what nails us to the wall in the seen.
O pin my heart to this rock with your trident.
No more going through the wave-smitten
instant! No more accident by way
of bow or loose arrow!
For no god is greater than the one who imagines her.
Fog whets its lips on the legato.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb