30.
and then he would take my hand gaining a sudden nerve to do it I could see drops of sweat stretch down his forehead to cheek to chin from there to chest where they stumbled somewhere between the very thick hair and the incredibly white t-shirt sweaty yet spotless no traces of filth he timidly grabbed my hand as if by mistake a mistake in which you persist after you make it to not become even more pathetic but he didn’t caress me he only held my hand in his large wet hand it endeared me so much I wanted in those moments to feel every wrinkle in his hand with my lips to invent a new chiromancy practiced by fingerprintless blind from time to time he tried to turn his face towards me but it seemed as if there was something that lured his gaze forwards and sometimes I felt that I saw a wild deer wolves boars hedgehogs once even a bear on the curbs in the mountain roads where I could barely feel my breath he tried to speak he maybe wanted to say look the wolf the hedgehog the deer the bear the wild boar or maybe I just imagined it and then we went over a bump and our hands would detach and become strangers again so far away in their minds that they will never have anything to say to each other
(I was talking to him about him in my mind:) fragile like a nap on the tip of your feet you walk to keep my protective shell from bursting the luminous sheet everything that can be between me and the world if you have to open your mouth only Sarah will suffer she will never reconcile with the stone she will have to go back to she will know that it is never so dark that she can’t see her soul in the whirls she will turn in a wound that is not hers and don’t squeeze in someone else’s fist what you know very well is yours so don’t look at her anymore take the road smoke water dreams and leave
31.
he couldn’t tell me that ever I knew he wouldn’t but sometimes I felt that strange fear which makes you believe you are the spikiest animal on earth and then I was just looking ahead barely breathing as if there were signs in the air that if I inhaled I would not see again and I would have missed something essential and I was sure that in the same air dusted with signs my hands could have left indelible traces as they moved creating trajectories that would compel me to walk then he lit a cigarette with the most natural strangeness that I could ever have witnessed if I had really existed in those four-wheeled moments rolling down a pavement foreign of any possible world
(I was talking to him about him in my mind:) lock me in your head in the glass wool of fixed ideas
nothing
nothing
nothing
is more real than this let’s sing in there about lili marlene blue angel or girl gone to bring breast wine to the soldiers on break between one fight and another see I don’t say hold me in your arms I don’t say come here I don’t even say go the brain the only one who can do something for that little box that we fit in for a while then everything would start to swell delirium burst from the joints we would go from one crack to another looking insane with some kind of eternal unbreakable waterproof glue thinking in the mind we share that maybe we will have a little bit of it left on our fingers when we finally take each other’s hand
32.
I will never stop wondering what his deal is and never dare to ask him it is enough that he breathes next to me that he holds the steering wheel he presses the accelerator and the brake and has his hand on the stick shift two finger lengths away from my hand why would I need a story in my mind movies play for me sometimes science fiction other times gore while through the window I see forests over forests pass me by and I wish to get to the desert faster no I don’t know if we will ever get to the desert I don’t ask questions I don’t want to know where we’re going or where we are every now and then I see a mile marker and then I wish I could quickly turn back and delete but this is for real I roll my eyes everywhere to fill my mind with as much visual information as I can load my hard drive I want the sign to disappear the marker the image of reality that anchors and I return to the images of spaceships post-apocalyptic landscapes or brains scattered on asphalt on walls on gasoline-stained overalls
(I was talking to him about him in my mind:) the scene helped him he is only one person in a scene any one person in a scene like this is interesting I was waiting for him I was transforming I didn’t even know what can happen in the soul of a half-asleep person when he sees in the window frame a horse I could only feel my arm moving slowly to the corner where I felt out the hiding place of the object he left behind and the gunpowder iron and glass I no longer need to tell myself that the shapes I feel out have nothing to do with the numbers I’m supposed to find every step of the way my illusion of being in error is confirmed
33.
I wanted to grab my belly with my hands bend and pour out all the stones I had swallowed my mind was constantly running over stones and he just breathed to my left letting everything go by itself the truck drove itself toward you the stones run my mind and the road to stretch out it didn’t make me any lighter it only spun invisible wheels that for me removed little noise by little noise the tireless pursuit of meaning when you pay attention to how someone breathes next to you and note by note the barely noticeable whisper places a secret song in your ear the search is suspended the moment becomes your place and cancels out whatever may come after deletes it it transposes and it screws you in place as it avoids levitation right where you are it makes you listen and be silent watch and see pass through without even the slightest strain then he moves he moves his hand to his nose or something you felt that he wants to turn his head towards you but you only saw his intention as if a ghost would have detached itself from the scalp from under his hair sliding down the skull and would meet your eyes get scared and go back and you would remember it only the next morning when from the mirror of a gas station bathroom a face with two sockets for eyes would look at you
(I was talking to him about him in my mind:) we could have never lived together in a house I could never have found his shirt in the laundry basket he would never have left it there he would never have left it anywhere we could never not have laid sheets to dry in the yard to run through and kiss in the heat of the sun I could never have found a book facedown on a nightstand next to a round stain left by a glass and a small white lamp we would never hear the noise of small steps through the house at night because we could never have lived in a house together
34.
the old man adjusted his felt hat one eye looked bigger but it was just the way he focused his gaze the right side of the face had more life than the other the other was steeped in a kind of dream we had stopped for a smoke he wanted to stretch his legs and get some air he had been here before he knew a few people who would come meet him at the front gate after they finished work for the day they communicated through a sort of silence that always ended with a story more or less true “in ’43–’44 allied planes were flying over and my mother fell into a bomb pit with me and I got out of there and I started to go ai-ai-ai with my little hands up I was chasing the planes away I was defending my mother who was then pregnant she was pregnant with Milică a brother who died” the old man cleared his throat and ran his palm over his dark mustache then they shook hands we continued on our way in the truck that cut through a road watching as night fell over everything else that could have been said
(I was talking to him about him in my mind:) can anything dig deeper into your flesh than the image of a red worm crawling on the traces of your vertebrae you lean to touch it with your lips and you know something no one knows when everything is said discussed explained denounced you look for a residue all the time a residue you hang on to rolling in the air never in a void never falling just looking for an entry point
from Detachment
Mina Decu
translated from the Romanian by Anca Roncea and Raj Chakrapani
Mina Decu’s poetry lacks centralization, is both ambiguous and densely organized, and uses sensation as a kind of place with lowercase letters and no punctuation. The doubling at the beginning and end of phrases and in long lists speed up the rolling motion in English. Her prose poetry, appearing as a cinematic, unpunctuated travelogue through the experience of an impossible intimacy, is truly revolutionary work within Romanian contemporary poetry. We were fascinated with the hybrid form of poetry, fiction, and memoir, written outside of a canonical notion of poetry, in a non-worshipful or elegiac tone, perhaps a language of injury, which jams together and smooths over many acts of violence that appear like love. We tried not to stretch out the language and let the road continue and smash together these sensations. The strength of the I throughout the poems holds them together gingerly. A challenge we faced as translators was also to bring the much more understated Romanian past conditional tense into English without letting it overpower the lines. A propulsion of narrative form, these poems offer a brief glimpse of an experience conveyed through a formal tone blended with informal diction. The poems published here are part of her debut poetry collection Desprindere (Detachment, 2018), which has drawn the interest of the Romanian literary world. It was awarded two national prizes and named by Observatorul Cultural (the foremost Romanian literary journal) as the most notable debut collection of 2018 while the Revista Timpul praises her work for “the robust narrative construction” and her ability to “develop a poetic atmosphere.”
Mina Decu is a Romanian-language poet and translator whose debut book of poetry Desprindere (Detachment) won the “Mihai Eminescu” Opus Primum Prize. She has taught social sciences and is currently working as a librarian. In 2018, she received the “Tânărul poet al anului 2018” (Young poet of 2018) award as well as the debut prize in the National Festival of Poetry “Colocviile George Coșbuc.”
Anca Roncea is a poet and translator. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s M.F.A. program in literary translation and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop poetry program. She is also a graduate of the University of Bucharest’s foreign languages programs in modern Greek and American cultural studies. In 2012–2013, she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. She has lived in Bucharest, Iowa City, Yangon, Los Angeles, Paris, and is currently in New York where she writes and translates poems. Through her work, she explores the space where language can create pivots in the midst of displacement while incorporating the aesthetics of Constantin Brancusi and the women artists of the Dada movement. Her work can be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Beecher's Magazine, Omniverse, Asymptote, The Bare Life Review and the upcoming issue of Lana Turner.
Raj Chakrapani is a poet, filmmaker, and translator. He received an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he wrote his collection of prose Brown People Who Speak English and his M.F.A. thesis on Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene. His work is out or forthcoming in Lana Turner, Speculative City, Triquartarly, Word Thug, Sequestrum, and Crevice. He currently teaches at Bard College.
