after your migrant childhood, femmy beasts still railing

                                                                like Karmēn who’s reaching for the cream millefeuille before circling the roses, before lingering and au-a-leu supining in the hothouse with the flytraps and the lust. What she can do? She’s wearing silk although it’s chilly and feeling carnivorous although it’s Lent. She’s possessed of all the gorgone but stuck in Brooklyn in the damp. Can her siblings offer solace, a return-trip to the start? She drives off to Mina and Andrea, who suggest amulets and rest, a fist of clove, a lick of ham, and, why not, a sturdy shelf. They run the mall antique shop, know frustration when they see it, and iritatie, oboseala, plangere, neliniste, nemulumire. This. Until Karmēn sweeps her hair awake with poetry and want, with reptile-shine and prophesy and malady and strop. Until what she can do now, dragă Muma Pădurii, except alight on Saint Mary’s during vespers, ignite the scarlet paschals

                                        beside the pblebotomist sisters Vol. On feasting days, Narcisa licks the aisle, her scales performing sequins, her tail a train along the carpet tiles. She can disappear a heartbreak, hide incisors ca ființele umane. But are you valuing her normalcy? Her mother’s burning earrings? Letti passes round the cozonac so that no one feels left out. So that no one spots the spleens they’ve stored in the cupboards or the sideboards, the corners of their labs, their reams of cotton laundered. When fly will they to Bucharest for new livers and fresh lungs? When prize will they the love from grooms in Saloniki Histria, Brăila, Tulcea, Isaccea, Sulina, Edessa, Kilkis? Here. Until they grab their lockets and singed fire blankets, their sweetmeats and their nouns, until oof, full of possessions and obsessions fierce, they wing it to the Embassy, for operă tragica, with Luminita & Lenuta, Mona, Mara & Ihrīn

                                            who are striking ready when the cad or count or soldier takes a swing at La Divina’s throat, back, gut; when the lover or the country take more than they know they should. Can you stop them glaring at the fathers, at the husbands and the homes? Can you staunch their cholers and fat cravings before the whole theatre gets a piece? Listen, Ei numai doar durează-n vânt / Deșerte idealuri - / Când valuri află un mormânt, /Răsar în urmă valuri. The women commit to railing until the bitter end. Until Luminita ricks out one of her hot hearts and lets it pound out in the open, a bloody, throbbing mess; a forecast and a tribute while the credits start to roll. Remedy and brace: do you see the circle cup her forehead then, plug her ruptures with thick furs? Do you hear them rouse Luminita pură vent we your fate, your testament, your belly, deadline, triumph, before they scream towards the house Smaranda lives, to her supply of jokes vulgar, to her rough prophesies and thickest skin and raspy vowels and stink

                                                            from foul dogs who wake the neighbours when the others show up rent, who stir the boa eryx jaculus slithering underneath the buffet? Have you eaten? she snaps, a fag latched between her lips. Are you fed? She slices muscle, drains the caș, and tells the consulates to leave. She tastes the clotting tocană and manifests the door: take your manners and your small talk and your sneering and your luck. Take your cunning and your smiling and your posture and you’re through. Smaranda won’t be calibrating aspic or folksongs glint with spit. She won’t be translating /Târâișul șarpelui /Și pasul gândacului /Vâjâitul vântului /Pulberea pământului or brilliant one-eyed cats. Don’t, she tells the others, dilute your simmerings or rotten-smelling stews. Don’t delete you dare the mongrels from your backwards scrambled clauses lumea pentru că urlă foarte încet de parcă ar fi un cățeluș are douăsprezece picioare și șase gâturi serpentine cu șase capete sălbatice pe vârfuri and so to save the spill, take back the rude, and say it to their face: steel the verbs your blood the nescience your crimes your murder words and sentences and flat hypoxic lakes we won’t to let you cock your heads, excise our tongues, we won’t to let you win

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Vana Manasiádis | Βάνα Μανασιάδη is a poet, editor, translator, and the author of four books including The Grief Almanac: A Sequel. She has been an Ursula Bethell and Michael King Writer in Residence and is continuing the mahi on her next book project, Your Catastrophic Tongues. She teaches and is taught at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha Canterbury University.