Mihaela Moscaliuc

Overcoat

                                    I’m just one person/but I have a mouth/but I said nothing.

— “The Sound of the Slap,” Judith Vollmer

 

Shoulders slouched, neck one step ahead of her body,
she shuffled toward the rear of the long railcar
to the conductor’s locker, opened its metal wing,
half-disappeared inside the narrow nook.

 

I knew the train stop, the derelict station,
the women who’d ride for warmth or change
till kicked off— headscarves hung low, skirts long,
bodies bent, you could not tell their age.
The locker, too, familiar: broom, bucket, bread,
cheap booze peeking from a coat’s pocket.

 

Doc Marten’d and air-podded teens
waved their student IDs and free passes.
The conductor barely glanced, disinterested,
it seemed, in anything she could not punch.

 

A whiff of citrus redirected her eyes.
Spotting the woman, she charged,
wrenched her away, smacked
her head hard, again and again.
Before the train came to a full stop,
she jostled her off the train.

 

The locker door swung open. Orange helices,
each coaxed from flesh in a single swirl,
hemmed the sorghum broom.
A question mark moved through the unplowed field.

 

Then and there, I thought I’d never allow myself
another orange. When I next spit out its pits,
I vowed never to allow myself a poem
about a woman who lifts bright globes
out of a stranger’s overcoat,
a woman whose olive skin is scored,

 

whose hunger quiet as she bursts open
the juice-filled sacs, swallows seeds,
takes each blow in silence,
a woman who shuffled past me not once,
but twice, protected by none, dear to none, disappeared.

 

 

Bodies… The Exhibition

 

I circle the bodies slowly— vivisected and sectioned
brain to rectum, dehydrated heart, fetus enwombed,
one foot’s tendons and ligaments pumped
with silicon to forever kick a soccer ball.

 

So much here with which I hadn’t credited the body,
so much to worship and regret. Afraid it’s too late
to compensate for decades of neglect, I search
for tumors, deformities and rot

 

preserved with gas and ultraviolet light
for clues into what has colonized, or will,
my body and bodies I love—

 

the liver ravaged by the cirrhosis that took
Mihai, Irina, Neculai; the burst aorta, my father’s,
barely holding to the heart; my rainbow spine.

 

In college, I skipped med-school friends’ bleaching party
for the skeleton they’d purchased on the black market,
feeling fortunate to be a lit student and reap insights
from trochees instead of trafficked bodies.

 

Sated, I exit through the museum gift store,
thinking how science and art give death its turn to beauty.
Li-Young’s sitting in a corner on the floor,
head slumped between knees.

 

I touch his shoulder, about to broach
plastication as poetic practice when his eyes meet mine:
All those bodies, M, scalpelled and flayed,
did you notice, did you see, why all Chinese.

 

 

Exuvial

I crack open his bedroom door and am relieved to find him still at home:
feet dangling over frame, Kendrick Lamar on loop on the phone.

 

He’s on Logic, making beats, my little bug, not quite eclosed from his pupa.
To kiss, in Romanian, is a pupa, and to do that now I need permission.

 

I knew one day I’d resent how little time I’d given myself with him,
how he too, in time, might begrudge it. And didn’t every mother forewarn me,

 

and still I did not prepare, the way hurricanes find you without flashlights
even when you’ve tracked them minute by minute.

 

I thought I could mother without unusual regrets,
and often gathered comfort from stories of insects who evolved

 

so their hatchlings would adapt to fend for themselves.
True, wood-burrowing cockroaches regurgitate food for their young,

 

doting earwigs lick their clutch of eggs clean of fungus
and centipedes curl like pliant shields around theirs

 

ready to waste away, if needed, rather than let go.
But once the brood learn the basics of their world—a clean cut.

 

To steal a smile, I tell him about Phylloneta Sisyphia,
how after exhausting their mother to literal death with their appetite,

 

spiderlings feast on her body then abandon home for good.
He retaliates with scorplings that coddle and splurge on their mom’s back

 

until she’s done with sacrificing and converts them into snack.
And so it goes, our freestyling: we prepare each other for flight,

 

then he feigns sleep so I can hold him —
a brief ruse against time, our collaborative beat.

 

 

Entangled

 

When we return, months later, my timid lilac
dons an extravagance of green, a sumptuous gown.

 

Up close, I recognize it as invasive,
and like a madwoman start yanking the vines,
snapping the corset that’s smothered
my flowering shrub. Not a tendril remains

 

by the time I halt, itchy with sweat and gnats,
suitcases still planted by the doorsteps.
The lilac’s compromised but will survive,
as will the kudzu whose fibrous root-crown

 

anchors tenaciously wherever it lands.
My son watches. He hasn’t said a word until now:
The plant did what it needed to survive.
Didn’t you say so yourself, call it glorious from afar?

 

 

 

A Year like All Others

Romania, 1988

That January I lost my mother’s heels at the dance social
and walked home barefoot through snow, convinced
those would be the only traces I’d ever leave.
Same week I befriended the cobbler with scotch-taped glasses
who promised to teach me to re-sole without tools.
When one teacher suggested I compensate for being pretty
by reading Kant, I took his words to heart,
but after Critique of Pure Reason, I felt no less dumb
and only confessed my fears to Isabela, rebel beauty
and phys wiz who’d taught me how to detect snitches
on shared phone lines. The afternoon they found her
in our hideout copse, head in noose, I was still giving Kant a try.
That summer, my father, the town’s photographer, bought off
officials with the promise of an unlimited supply of photo shoots
and that conditional clearance gave me the first border-crossing.
In Mariánské Lázně, shape-shifting with the singing fountains,
I wailed through every jet. In Prague, I sold export hoodies
in back alleys and re-stuffed my duffle bag with bootleg LPs,
klobásy, and marionettes. It hailed more vigorously than usual
in July, and I pushed through the The Catcher in the Rye,
contraband on loan from the English tutor. The penalty
for confusing the irregulars was kissing, so I absorbed
the syntax quickly and started taxiderming lies.
October delivered a phantom pregnancy, and I ascribed it
to the jubilance of bees. Orchards had thrived unscientifically
that summer and by Christmas I’d begun rationing honesty.
I had no clue in less than a year I’d chant in the town square,
hyped with revolution, then abscond to the U.S., disoriented,
the grid of the town cemetery as my sheet music.