In Washington Square Park
Pigeons fly overhead, scattering above the arch, then diving over NYU students, tourists, and a homeless woman who sings I’m a lover, and I’m a sinner,
and up again, a murmuration of mute pigeons, gray like winter, stealing the thoughts of everyone in the park,
flying, turning with them, turning them into ideas of spring, music notes in the bleak sun,
and giving them back to us, to me, with my memory of you, singing I’m a lover, and I’m a sinner,
and spring is nowhere to be seen, until is here, surrounding me, touching me, seeping inside me with the breath of a lover,
a wild, perfumed iris that’s not opening for me, but nevertheless opening, opening.
Ways to Disappear
Go swim in the Black Sea in September, leaving your slippers behind.
Plant a garden and go pick the ripe blackberries among the tall weeds at the other end.
Walk on that country road that connects your village with the sky.
Keep going until you reach the old house where your grandmother still prunes the pink rose.
Sit in its quietest room, reading a crumbling book.
Turn the page with a finger of wind.
Inside the snow globe
Snowflakes fall like the faces of everyone we ever met, a blizzard of crowds.
And each snowflake reminds me of us in our younger years,
the way we floated so unsure from the sky and clung to hair and lashes,
looking for a safe place to land, looking for ourselves.
*
If time were tangible, it would be made of snowflakes,
falling, all those years, falling through us,
peeling from us, piling, piling in drifts outside our windows.
*
Come closer, love, and leave the lights off.
Come close to the window and let’s look at all the years falling.
Put on the kettle and listen, love,
to the whispers, the blizzard of our blood.
Vacuuming before the holidays
I’m amazed how much dust gathers in rugs, on furniture, in corners, under shelves, and in the floor,
dust and spider webs, gray, sticky, and sprawling, entire cities of dust in crevices and creases, those places no one notices.
I know something about those places.
I remember when I was little I told my mother who was trying to paint a straight line on the kitchen wall, Mommy, I see mountains and valleys and crevices that you don’t even notice. But I notice them! she yelled. I see them, and they drive me nuts because my shaky hands are making them!
So much dust in so many mountains and valleys inside my house makes me laugh at that memory when I sweep, vacuum, and beat it out from crevices, baseboards, and rugs.
And I’m a firm believer that nature never does anything gratuitous and nothing goes to waste.
What then is the purpose of dust? Why does it exist, and why so much of it?
So there is something for plants to root in when they take over the mountains, valleys, and crevices.
So we have something to return to, my daughter says.
Walking the High Line on a Cold Night
You tell me The Vessel is closed because of suicides.
The huge Pigeon is still surrounded by mobs at this late hour,
and I wonder if the other birds in the park see this sculpture as god.
The other artworks are creepy— heads of animals and humans on silvery sticks
and a mural of saints with curly black hair pouring out of their mouths.
The backlit grasses are the real works of art. Illuminated tufts, twigs, and plumes move in the wind
and the moon, a bright seed pod, bursts through the clumps in the sky.
You tell me one wouldn’t die if they jumped over the parapet into the street below.
I shudder that you thought about this and catch your cold hand in the dark.
Since I was little, I knew
Anything that I imagine in detail won’t happen.
That’s why I think about ways to disappear,
freak accidents, a fall, a heart attack.
That’s why I think about death, its fluttering red scarf over our heads.
Because if I can imagine its every crease and fold,
it will never touch us.
Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet, copywriter, editor, and translator who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Gravel, The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Brooklyn Rail/InTranslation, Asymptote, carte blanche, Going Down Swinging, Oxford Poetry, The Lake, Ambit, Banshee Lit, among others. Her most recent books are In Those Years, No One Slept (Broadstone Books, 2023) and Writing on the Walls at Night (Unsolicited Press, 2022). Her collection of selected poems translated into Arabic, Tonight I’ll Become a Lake into which You’ll Sink, was published in Egypt in 2021.