I
The tree grew straight up from the ground.
It was green. The ground was green, the tree.
Even my hands that were not quite hands
but leaves. They shadowed a face. Not
quite a face but a fruit. I, too, grew straight up
from the ground and into the air. The air
was the flesh of a larger fruit and I, its seed.
The tree and I were two halves of the same
kernel. We waited to be picked. We
weighed heavily on a branch somewhere
beyond air. We didn’t know where. Only
the where knew us. It knew the air, which was
the fruit. It knew the seeds, which were
the tree and the I, so much like the tree.
The where was something like time. A place
but not a place. An even larger fruit. A fruit
that couldn’t be picked by anyone. But how
could we have known. We ripened. We
ripened faster than thought. The thought,
it never did. The thought was in itself a kernel.
All green and bitter flesh. And someone
out there hungered but dared not eat it.
II
In the dream, it was already autumn. The sky
was an overcast autumn sky. The wind,
an overbearing autumn wind. Even the rain
had something of the fall in it and plunged
invariably to the ground. And what was
the girl in that dream? The girl was a bad
grade. A mouth filled with nails. A mouth
sealed with glue. A tongue to drill into.
Wholly unholy. The girl watched her face
in rain puddles far too long and saw
strangers. Processions. Futures she longed
to grow into. Baptisms of selves not
of this world. Selves that fought their way
out of the rain and under her skin.
The girl was fourteen. She tried on smiles
like flattering garments no one would
see through. Daily she opened her skull
to whomever was bored enough to sift
through her fear. Oh the things they said.
About her mother, her father, her sick, old cat.
Hungry things. Things that had only eaten
two lying fish and a whole loaf of nothing.
The girl learned early that mean words
were colanders. Each night, she rinsed them
of meaning. Each night, she spawned
her body in ink, that self-fulfilling petri dish.
She haloed her body with trees, thoughts
sufficiently solid to lean against. She drew
a circular window above her bed, imperfectly
framed with questions. A shallow pond
teeming with reeds, in which the bloated moon
wobbled in circles like an all-knowing fish.
III
I walked through time as if through a foreign
city. No shelter, no food. No language
to push roots into. I spoke in syllables of sand.
Faceless passers-by collapsed into sandheaps
as soon as my voice brushed by them.
I feared my own mouth, a sandpit.
It had swallowed my body
and threshed what remained of its shadow
in a sandstorm. It wrung the shadow like a rope,
twisted it like a cherry stem on the spade
of its tongue. Tossed it into a shadow
orphanage that had misplaced the bodies
of its children. I feared my mouth and
baptized my fear with sand. From my green
womb, fear climbed into a grave
I kept open in the mind. The mind
was a desert. Dune after dune after dune.
Grave after grave. I tried to avoid the places
where I’d been hurt but each lucid
morning, I’d wake up in front of the same
door, a beggar. Toothless. Hungry.
My hands, old. My feet, old. I had lived
a long night in the dream, a night that lasted
several lifetimes, and I remembered
everything. Like the time my father came back
from his trip and brought me rabbit bread.
Dark, crusty, a sprinkling of salt
on each slice. Salt that tasted like sand
on my slapped cheek after a good cry.
Each mouthful, symbolic. Huge clods of dirt
turned with the blade of a minuscule
hoe. Sweat streaming down a whiskered face.
The rabbit’s, naturally, not my father’s.
My father couldn’t grow whiskers if he tried.
But that house. With its crumbling balcony
smothered with vines. Thick as my arms,
they could be easily climbed by anyone
and had been indeed. By our promiscuous
cat and her suitors. Whose plaintive
yowls I can still hear in my sleep. That house.
Where drunken poets crashed on the floor
in the middle of the night. And sometimes
mistook my bedroom for the bathroom. That
house. Where I’d eaten bread with salt
and felt at home. It is not there, is it.
Unless I dream it. That house. Where memory
keeps the doors jammed with debris.
Where memory sweeps under a threadbare rug
the grains of self. That languish. In the dust.
–
Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) and a woman made entirely of air (Dancing Girl Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in various journals, including New England Review, Lake Effect, and The Nation.