"There Are Things I Know How to Do" & "In Hopes of Great Snows"
by Andreea Iulia Scridon
There Are Things I Know How to Do
arrange my stuffed animals
in order by IQ, whisper just right
in classrooms, cinemas and beds,
narrowly overdo the contours of my
lips with the bar of carmine,
have the good sense to abstain
from showing the distress
nobody would want to see.
My tentacles know how to spin
the perfect protective placenta:
in love and in world, cowardice
clouds these two eyes
as breath fogs over an amethyst.
But when the thunderstorm leaked
through my cardboard sanctuary,
like Hamlet’s, the walnut tree
(which, by tradition, we know must be
the victim of our torture, for rules are rules),
I was alone in the world,
I was alone in my life.
A red ball rolled past me
and hit the statue of Samuil Micu
in the head.
What’s the use of soccer in the rain?
Why did it take me so long
to realize that the real perverts
are the ones who get off on your tears?
And why, if the living are more numerous now
than those beneath the earth have ever been,
are we so alone?
In Hopes of Great Snows
I.
We walked home in the first snow
and the first snow
was silent as a garret.
We wore the cold’s eyes
in the mantle of our hair.
The old statue in our square
bore the white ermine on his shoulders.
We are few, but rich!
in red candles, colivă, and masses,
and in chrysanthemums of all colors.
We are rich in graves!
We fray
like the ends of shoelaces.
Our telomeres
are lined with gold.
They cut to their quick
one by one.
II.
It snows as in fairytales,
it’s warm and it snows,
it snows as it only can snow
in countries forgotten by fate,
that’s fairytale snow, of cotton,
soft southern snow.
In such countries
branches bear brave weights
of fuzzed fruit or of snow
that snow which waxes the soaked boughs
now a fist of cherry blossoms in descendo
Like the crystals
delicately bombarded
from the sky,
the souls of people
who walk the earth
are even more varied
than their bodies.
Take, for example,
this era of enchantment:
dear world,
you’re so old and ugly
but I find you so lovely
in this acropolis of death!
Photo cover by Julia Dragan