I am the sum of nothing

& all  

by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

               the difference

between silence          
                        & noise

an autumn late or

            the forthcoming
                        spring

the nightingale up
                      in the sky  

 the burnt cathedral
                 in my eye  or

the conclusion of
                being such

a parody
            of space & time

melancholia

Spring comes in waves of joy

            subtract your body

            from time      it will fly

            free of words       sounds

            entangled with the last

            snow    the bird 

                                    on the roof

another day      another open tomb

the rose      supreme

failed to be rose      I touched

the ground with wounded

lips      to say a word

to leave a sign

of rapture—

the fire grew from stone

to stone

there was

            an altar in my heart

                        & people came & went

around

they are coming

             the waves

the hours & the lack of hours digging

your grave   

             who are you & why are you

here        at the beginning of the end

                                    I am full of time unspent

                        unaware    too much of this

            too much of that         heart         heart

                        who dies once dies many times

                   heart pulsing

                                                with love

                        the fire creeping down

                                                             :  ash

BIO

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, Romanian-American poet, Ph.D. in French, is the author of many collections of poetry published in the United States, Romania and France. She writes poetry in English, French and Romanian, though she does not translate any of her work between languages. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary magazines in the United States, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Romania. Her last two collections of poetry I Scrape the Window of Nothingness (2018)and Traveling With the Ghosts (2021) were published by Orison Books. A Cry in the Snow, translated from the French (Un cri dans la neige, Editions du Cygne, Paris) was published in 2018 by Seagull Books Press. Radulescu’s French books received several awards, including the Grand Prix de la Francophonie and the Prix Amélie Murat.

This is a consummate language shaped with remarkable skill, and the voyages these poems take are brilliant excursions into our inner lives, secret things pushed into the subconscious.
—Keith Flynn, author of Colony, Collapse, Disorder