A Print above the Kitchen Sink
Wet with colors,
bursting, opening up
like compliments, the petunias
my sister has multiplied from cuttings
cascade over her balcony
on the sixth floor.
Only the purple petunias
ease up the tension,
take away the otherwise monastic look,
the postulant air of her rooms,
crumbling shelves of books,
loads of laundry dried on the line
waiting for the implacable
torment of the iron on a hot day.
Only the petunias erase the backdrop
of the buzz in the kitchen,
her carrying groceries on two buses
and up the stairs,
perfume of velvet
at she rests her aching back against the wall
respite from her punitive list of chores,
a Georgia O’Keeffe print
above her kitchen sink.
Dodging Her Fear
After his death
she catches a bus to their house out of town
though scared of his drunkard friends
and she locks the gate, bolts the doors,
and from a neighbor she borrows a dog
who barks all night in front of her room
so at two she walks in the garden
and finds her way to the plum trees
wobbly with fruit,
prune cu gȃt, goldane.
He planted three plum trees
and they kept walking—
reseeded themselves like steps—
and she doesn’t have the heart
to cut them down. She plans
her summers around sour cherries,
fills the pantry with jars of dulceaţă
that she hurdles to her children on the train
but it’s the plum trees at night
for which she dodges her fear
undeterred by beetles and frogs
and listens to the night buzzing with silence,
the assail of lizards as she reaches for
the elastic branches of trees
and feels for plums,
the night purple with moon.
Born in Romania, Lucia Cherciu is a Professor of English at SUNY Dutchess in Poughkeepsie, NY, and she writes both in English and in Romanian. Her poetry appeared in “Connecticut Review,” “Connotation Press,” “Cortland Review,” “Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment,” “Memoir,” “Off the Coast,” “Paterson Literary Review ,” “The Prose-Poem Project,” “Spillway,” “Oglinda Literară,” “Pro Saeculum,” “Salonul Literar,” “Timpul,” “Hyperion,” “Contrapunct,” “Astra,” and elsewhere. She is the author of two books of poetry: Lepădarea de Limbă (The Abandonment of Language), Editura Vinea 2009, and Altoiul Râsului (Grafted Laughter), Editura Brumar 2010.
–Art by Dia Takácsová