by Romana Iorga

…and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.
Federico García Lorca, “City That Does Not Sleep”

1.
The city is a cage of dead doves
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
A city of fogs and strange consonants
burning a hole in the sky.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty
full of faint light?
Green wind. Green branches
like affectionate mouse whiskers?
In these alleys of vowels, which comfort me,
the wind and body are no longer distinct.
How I love and let go all at once.

2.
Only the dead this morning are not old.
The sun went down through crimson bars,
trembling like a flag under fire,
fume-glossed, unbearably shrill,
with a mouth full of sharpened teeth.
I feel the pulse of this inferno,
red with a touch of sulfur,
my chest filled like a jar with dirt—
the sudden color of a word
lonely beyond all silence.
Sometimes I think it must be God.

3.
The forest is dense where you are going.
Don’t despair of this falling world, not yet.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
the endless ebb and flow of a desire to cry.
What I wish to say is this:
I want the world to be without language
when I can’t remember what’s lost.
Why do we seal off those places—
we, whose lives are only a few words?
Will you speak before I am gone?
will you prove already too late?

4.
It seems to me that I was falling for a long time.
            Near, nearer, all the way
into a shape I could see and understand.
            Early spring everywhere, the trees furred
with all the numberless goings-on of life,
            the hills thick with moving memories,
trying their best to keep me alive.
            Is it a good thing to find
a dance of strangers in my blood?
            Dearest, who was my country,
not even a bird could escape becoming more like a bird.

Sources: [José Marti, Pablo Neruda, Eavan Boland, Louisa A. Igloria, Adrienne Rich, Ezra Pound, Federico García Lorca, Mark Van Doren, Monica Ferrell, Anaïs Duplan, Georgina Marie Guardado, Mark Van Doren, William Stanley Braithwaite, Frank O’Hara, Les Murray, Candace G. Wiley, Mai Der Vang, Zubair Ahmed, Donika Kelly, Rosmarie Waldrop, Yvor Winters, Elsa Gidlow, M. Bartley Seigel, Jane Hirshfield, Joy Harjo, Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Garett Hongo, Loretta Diane Walker, Charles Reznikoff, Walt Whitman, André Breton, Diane Seuss, Anaïs Duplan, Catherine Pierce, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Moore, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Pierre Joris, Fatimah Asghar, Shara McCallum, Wo Chan]