Briccetti, Clara Burghelea, Stephen Bluestone, et. al.

Lee Briccetti on “To Stabilize, It’s Buttercups”:

“To Stabilize, It’s Buttercups” began quite literally as a walk in the park near my New York City apartment building. I encountered a little boy—maybe three or four years old—who became fascinated with my binoculars as I was birdwatching. He wanted to be friends and he began to explain what he understood about the difference between reality and imagination. He spoke as a philosophy professor, declaiming with conviction and passion for the truth. I went home so happy to have had a prophetic encounter. Eventually, there were a few drafts of a poem (over a few weeks), all in quatrains, a structure I have rarely used before. Perhaps the stanzaic form was inspired by rereading Songs of Experience but at the time I was not conscious of it; the boy and his message were always the heart of the poem.

Clara Burghelea on translating Ștefan Manasia:

“The walnut and honey cookies” is part of Ștefan Manasia’s collection The Taste of Cherries, a eulogy of love that pendulates between the mundane and the imaginary. This persona poem captures the poet’s vacillating stance between the outside, at times a hostile world, and his inner emotions ignited by the confiscating love story.  This poem showcases Manasia’s craft: his organic structuring of the verse, his stylistic ingenuity, his word play, his taste for history and myths. One challenge was to capture the pirouetting between tenderness — “We talk about the Christmas we are going to spend / drinking green apple tea and tasting the walnut and honey cookies, in the little living room with windows open on the tender and rainy Bosphorus” — and historical accountability — “The communist president, an aging Nikita Mihalkov, /married to a Heidi -the perfect excuse /to be still living here, always ready to notice, to report if /the Ruins of the Reich /were still the Ruins of the Reich.” The shifting tone and the juxtaposition between tenderness and violence are what makes the poem remarkably intriguing, yet demanding for a translator intent on carrying across Manasia’s figurative language and use of cultural nuances.

Stephen Bluestone on “The Trolley”:

The incident on the trolley during WWII really happened. It took place when I was quite young, but I remember it as if it happened yesterday. The trolley was stuck for some time, and I remember with great clarity what the other passengers were wearing, the women in their everyday dresses and the men in collars and jackets. It was a scene from another time, when the whole culture (the adults, I mean) seemed unified not only in dress but in some essential core way. The mysterious stranger opened a circuit box of some kind and quickly fixed whatever was wrong and the trolley motor started up and everyone applauded and the hero of the moment then left as abruptly as he had first appeared and we started moving again. If there’s anything that triggered that moment for me into a poem, it would have to have been our constant experience today of random shootings and school killings. It’s the stunning contrast between an innocent and heroic time, at least as childhood memory pictures it and movie newsreels back then portrayed it, and a present in which chaos seems ever about to happen. “The Trolley” also became a poem, I think, because I can remember movie audiences at the time breaking into spontaneous applause at the image of FDR on the screen. And the other side’s losses were, as I say in the poem, always greater than our own. Surely a different time, as recall it from the perspective of early youth.

Jane Medved on “I prefer synthetic grass”:

After fifteen years of trying (and failing) to landscape our back garden, I gave up and installed synthetic grass. At first it was a temporary solution, but after a few months I grew to love the convenience and flexibility. After all, most days I could barely tell the difference. I decided to write about my new uncomplicated stress-free life. But as the images gathered momentum, I realized I was meditating on the damage our need for physical comfort inflicted on the natural world. At some point during the writing, I was in my kitchen and a single bee (the first I had seen all summer) flew in, clearly lost and confused. It was heartbreaking to see it stumble into the walls. That scene of loss become the final image

Samuel Espinosa Mómox on how “Stable” and “Quiromancy”  happened:

I don’t keep a record of when and how I write a poem. Most of them are part of small projects around a specific topic, that I try to wear out until I have nothing else to say. Then, I let them rest. Sometimes for several months, sometimes even years. I wrote Quiromancy as a part of a book named Casquete corto, “crew cut”, because my grandfather was a barber and I spent part of my childhood with him. The book was my effort to make sense out of it all, but mostly, to understand him. I think the first draft was read in a workshop around 2013;  I wanted him to have one copy, but he died in 2018 and the final version was published in 2020. In the end I became a barber myself after he died, so I think we are even by now.

Stable is, as vulgar as it may sound, a mental response to a friend’s Facebook post commemorating the person that took care of her family’s horses in her childhood. Horses, in plural. A response to the fact that some people have horses in their childhood and others don’t. Some people will never have horses, and will never even ride a horse. Some people may have horses but others have wonder, theoretical knowledge, dreams, resentment of horses. I will never be able to gift my children a horse, but I made them this poem. Hopefully, it will do the trick.

Author: Plume

Plume: Plume Issue #170 October 2025