Cemetery Ink: Poems

By Mihaela Moscaliuc

In poems of compassion and social justice, Mihaela Moscaliuc probes borders and memory to work through, and further complicate, understandings of belonging—from places (including her native Romania) and histories, to ways of knowing, loving, and grieving. If the wounded populate these poems, so too do goats, black swans, centipedes, dismembered dolls, and wandering wombs. The ekphrastic sequence on Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy honors stories of Roma people while addressing issues of (mis)representation and epistemic violence. As in previous collections, cemeteries become sites of power, holding the living accountable.

The homeless women of Iaşi

So many shouting at no one, disputing
accusations, nodding maniacally,
flogging trees with headscarves—
their pantomimes re-populate
sidewalks with ousted ghosts.
They pose no threat
but we detour cautiously,
afraid their siren voices might awaken
the penal colony in our ribcage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9780822988243

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Father Dirt and Immigrant Model and the translator of Romanian poet Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper. Moscaliuc's essays have appeared in History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics, The Task of Un-Masking: Essays on Poetry and Race, and Globalizing Cultures: Theories and Paradigms Revisited. She received her Ph.D. from University of Maryland, her M.F.A. from New England College, and her M.A. from Salisbury University. Moscaliuc is an assistant professor of English at Monmouth University and is on the core faculty of Drew University's MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

Book preview

PITT POETRY SERIES

ED OCHESTER, editor

UNIVERSITY of PITTSBURGH PRESS

CEMETERY INK

MIHAELA MOSCALIUC

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2021, Mihaela Moscaliuc

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6657-9

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6657-3

Cover art: Morris Graves (1910–2001), Spring Jardiniere No. 12, 1950, tempera and watercolor on paper, 18 ¾ × 11 ⅜ inches (47.6 × 28.9 cm), signed. Private Collection. © Morris Graves Foundation; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

Cover design: Alex Wolfe

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8824-3 (electronic)

for Fabian and Kiernan

Contents

Black swan

The homeless women of Iaşi

After tram 2 leaves the depot

The house

Maggot therapy

Wandering womb borrows language from Aretaeus, 2nd century

Bread

Americana

From the rented window

The fortuneteller

Transatlantic

I should be able to tell when the end is near

Mosquito

from The Book of Salt

Blessing

Milk ramble

Pollutants

Carne de los Muertos

Elegy for my mother’s employer

Kitchen talk

Sortilege, strawberry fields

Syn-

Empathy test

Assimilation: The Lamancha goat

Goatscape

Culpable metaphors: On Henri Rousseau’s La Bohémienne Endormie, or Sleeping Gypsy

La isla de las muñecas

OB-GYN clinic, Iaşi, Romania, 2015

Brains

Mess up for beauty

John Cale’s 75th birthday concert, NYC

Creature

On lava

After Hadrian, in praise of desire

Love poem with chute

Stump

Forget the blossoms

Erotic

Self as goat in tree

Notes

Acknowledgments

Found poem

A stranger sleeps next to me,

a stone beside another stone.

First person ever to enter my life

without knocking.

He hasn’t said anything to me,

I haven’t said anything to him,

but I have nothing to say to him,

nor to hide from him.

A single stranger sleeps next to me

and a whole crowd has come in with him.

— adapted from Mihail Sebastian’s

For Two Thousand Years (1934)

Black swan

Each day I returned to watch.

Naïvely, I figured nutrients the culprit,

as with flamingoes whose pinkness paled

then settled into solid white

once the state zoo exhausted its carotene pellets.

I waited for the first discoloration,

some aha of transitioning grey,

convinced she’d slowly flush out

gunk fed by idiotic tourists.

This will take time,

returning my swan to myths, where she belongs,

time I have, leftover time

from years of killing time in the darkroom.

For spare change, I’d spin the knob

on the developing tank and blow-dry

orders with expedited deadlines.

The developer, the stop, then fixer baths

I’d rock for pleasure

to watch the world rise

from white photographic paper,

blur swept by certitude in the final tray.

I was first to see her before she met the light,

though of course she’d already been brought into focus

by my father’s precise eye. I don’t know

how many test strips he needed to get the exposure right

or what it took him to learn how to turn

a white swan black,

wanting to prove to his