Mihaela Moscaliuc

The House

With stained red awnings
Long abandoned
Sealed with the dust of linden

I won’t break in to claim
The chess board that taught
Nothing but patience

I won’t break in to salvage
The cherry bole
Trapped in the hearth

The gangrened bough
With leaves curled
Like fossilized fetuses

Though that’s all I need

For the borş fermenting
In the massive glass jar
That nests in the cellar

If I do it right

The tonic will replenish
Misspent flora     the splinter
will release the orchard

If I do it right

Golden orb-weavers have spun
Silk wheels sturdier than steel
To snare errant sparrows

Hammocks that might hold
Two bodies     ghost hearsay
I already know

You can’t break in for me
And I won’t break in
To search for myself

Author: Mihaela Moscaliuc

Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Heartmoor (AJB, forthcoming), Cemetery Ink, Immigrant Model, and Father Dirt, translator of Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper and Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star, editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern, and co-editor of Fruits of the Earth: Harvest Poems and Border Lines: Poems of Migration. She is a 2025 Guggenheim fellow and recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, a fellowship from the Hawthornden Foundation, two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright. Moscaliuc directs the MA program in English at Monmouth University. mmoscaliuc.com

Plume: Issue #98 October 2019