By: Andreea Ceplinschi
Good Face
in Facebook sunsets it’s not the you or I
who drink themselves yellow,
behind clever quips on the state of the nation
first-born sons don’t go to prison for class B felonies,
inspirational poetry screenshots
filter out debt collector calls and shower sobs with Paw Patrol on full volume in the other
room, the toddler doesn’t know, covered in mashed carrot for a candid shot:
“they grow so quick” heart emoji
and landlords don’t sell to second homeowners
Ke$$ha songs
stranger validation
no blade touching thigh skin, no breath-softening pill
a meme – everything’s fine,
and the you or I never kill themselves
on Instagram.
I Turn the Five of Ice Over
and my tongue tastes rotten
lilac buds bursting
to find one please, one thing beautiful
but I don’t know enough
to come in out of the rain
go to bed alone
to the ghost sounds of you watching TV one wall away
in your hotel room in your new home in a different state
thick night breathing wet thighs pressed against your window
the sieve of my mouth open for thunder clouds
tongue at the cuts in my cheeks
rotten wounds the color of spring you taught me to welcome
the gift of being steppingstone
Can I release these lilac buds into your ear against the wall?
Can you hear them screaming, bursting open?
This Is Just to Tell You How at 3am
rock bottom turns weapon
I pick it up and check a thumb with it whack!
thumb splits open to eleven years old again
under mother’s shadow, white elephant with her green eyes
staring me down as the meningitis spiked a fever in a naked hospital bed
where 80,000 screaming fluorescent lumens held the door open
for the sterile room to whoosh past my ears
sore with the swollen flame of spinal fluid her hallucinated paper face
– half-mother, half-animal –
watching me vomit amniotic bile over rusted bed rails,
jerked spasms panning me a full view
of an empty folding chair where seconds before I’d willed an elephant guard
into holding my hand
33 days watching that chair empty into the corner of my eye
She’s not going to make it the doctor said, the nurses said, and I heard, and mother heard,
and she walked away, and I didn’t believe in God, but prayed, awake for 33 nights,
that she was only away mourning and would be back at daybreak
at 3am rock bottom turns projectile dropping over and over
and over every bed I ever lay in afraid to sleep
under the shadow of the white elephant
eleven years old
digging up unexploded shells as children do whack!
I split open
Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian-American writer, currently living on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her poetry and creative nonfiction has been featured online in Passengers Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Into the Void, Prometheus Dreaming and in print in the 2019 Prometheus Unbound finalist issue.
"I’m still rather new to writing and have little formal education in the art of it, compared to a lot of other emerging poets, so I don’t have any clever insight regarding my method. What I can say is that it’s helped me process past trauma and recover from major crisis moments in my recent life. In a sense, these poems are compulsive confessions in an attempt to somehow feel seen and less alone. And as much as these are deeply personal works, processing divorce, parental abandonment and suicidal ideation, I do insist that the reader remain aware of the difference between the writer and the speaker of these poems. So if you, reader, find yourself empathizing with the speaker, find a feeling that breaks you and you recognize, or something you connect with to glue some broken pieces back together, it’s you the poems are for."