Claudia Serea
(Romania-USA)
Useless things
Let’s invent useless things,
the ultimate freedom.
I’ll make marble eggs,
headless dolls,
and stringless violins.
I’ll write poems
that don’t put food on the table
with words that no one understands:
mailpill,
painstain,
wheelfence.
I’ll buy dream bags
and wrinkles with pockets
and shepherd on 5th Avenue
a camelostrich herd.
Or is it a gaggle
of ostrichcamels?
I’ll chain the night and day
to the sidewalk
and feed them live
pigeonmice.
Around me, the world tilts, rocks, spills,
burns, crashes, cooks,
dies, laughs, cries.
And I plant thunderseeds,
steep tea in a wooden tea pot,
and hold my marble egg carefully
like a mother cat
carrying her newborn kitten
in her mouth.
About languages
In what language
does the house painter paint?
Does the wind in Chile
speak Spanish to the trees?
Do the gulls over the Hudson River cry
Whitman’s verse?
And what about
the Statue of Liberty?
In what language does she
keep silent?
The city pulls us apart
With the outstretched arms
of the mannequins at Macy’s,
with 34th Street
and 7th Ave,
with intersections
and millipedes
of feet on sidewalks,
the city pulls us apart.
It forks ahead
and zips up on our heels.
We join in bedrooms,
in restaurants and bars,
in The New Yorker
and The Hound,
and part in Bloomingdale’s
and in Penn Station,
come back together
in cinemas and Bryant Park,
and step away at work,
in public bathrooms,
in languages
and tongues,
on trains, further away,
in Lincoln Tunnel,
and more work.
It’s not your fault,
or mine
that JFK pulls us apart,
that life pulls us apart.
And then we’re back again
on Skype.
I have to go now, bye.
The city pulls us apart,
the city pulls us,
the city pulls.
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BIO
Claudia Serea’s poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, 5 a.m., Meridian, Gravel, Prairie Schooner, and many others. An eight-time Pushcart Prize and four-time Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky (8th House Publishing, 2013), To Part Is to Die a Little (Cervena Barva Press, 2015) and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month, and she co-hosts The Williams Poetry Readings in Rutherford, NJ. Her latest project is Twoxism, a poetry-photography collaboration blog.