Tristiana
  
 June today, and June’s days blossom one by one, 
 as does the rose’s miraculous swirl, and its shame, 
 and so do cruel amoebas and enchanted beetles,
 and thoughts of every crazy kind, it seems
 we model summer’s days from wet clay.
  
 It seems that my mother, Cristiana, my mother, Tristia,
 is already that legendary tuberose of ancient photographs, 
 but long a pillar of salt. The spirits that walk our house
  
 make the oven twitch, and it seems I am afraid
 to leave this prison, afraid of someone so free, 
 someone like me. It seems I am closer in June
 than any other to our neighbors in the solar system.
  
 Yes, in June, I’m closer to the whole solar system
 than any other, following the paper airplane in the sky, 
 that bird with the iron beak, accumulating those distant
  lands in greed and hurry, the machine made to save me 
 against my uphill movement against the downhill spin 
 of the earth, under the moon’s rheumy eyeball...


 
 The Citadel
  
 In love I’m flayed
 and uncocooned - 
  
 those loons of eyes, 
 with lash and gloop,
 ball and chain 
 to the peaked and ferrous brain 
 coo mournful ballads
 under the influence of elderflower ale,
 they flutter and fly, 
 bring the stars down in the tips of their beaks
 they swallow the east and the west whole
 wolfish like the wife of Bath.
  
 So why does that particular look,
 so homogenous and wrong, 
 of the pieces that make me up
 disgust me?
  
 Why do I feel disdain for those who lack them?
 Why can’t I untangle the shower cord?
  
 Why is not men, but women
 who penetrate the antediluvian worlds of sorrow?
  
 And why, 
 if my cat wears a cone and if you’re here,
 does it rain with dirt instead of milk?


 
  
 A Cosmonaut
  
 Grazing the blades of your stratosphere
 with the tips of my fingers, 
 brushing my soles
 against the planet you live so firmly anchored on 
 in light and boundless cartwheels, 
 I elongate the distance between us
 like sticky pink sherbet, 
 like a cosmonaut…
  
  
 (Previously published in ASH Literary Journal, Oxford)

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Andreea Iulia Scridon is a poet and translator. She studied Comparative Literature at King’s College London and Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. In 2020, she was awarded the University of Oxford’s STAAR Editorial Prize. She has a poetry chapbook forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books and a poetry book forthcoming with MadHat Press in 2022. These three poems are from her collection, A Romanian Poem.

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