has become the day’s Dadaist crack,
and your ears, the single Romanian pair in the room
have grown enormous.
The face carnation, the throat a locked gun,
and the final chimes of derision or shame
hit against your tympani
like droplets of rain on the windshield
in traffic, after school
as Mama drives you home.
Now whenever someone asks where you’re from,
your own eyes are factory-glazed
with a protective layer of irony
-- it makes for a charming, exotic effect,
someplace between Latin and Slavic,
these two prudent agate stones.
But in the evening,
after you’ve returned to your counterfeit home,
you lie in the dark,
and watch Nadia’s Perfect Ten
on YouTube
granulated by pixels
and time
the golden bird still lovely
after its desecration.
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Andreea Iulia Scridon studies Creative Writing at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She writes poetry and fiction, and translates from Romanian to English. Her work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, World Literature Today, WildCourt, E·ratio Poetry Journal, Harana Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Asymptote and E·ratio. This poem is part of a forthcoming ‘Romanian Sequence.
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