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Lucia Cherciu
The Butcher
Blistered fingers swollen as if held under water all day, the butcher explained that once she had to stay in the hospital for a month from a hand infection.
What gloves? She laughed while cleaving large hunks of meat. The man who brought the pigs just hung them from the hooks. She had to bribe somebody for this job, and her husband had to intervene. In the wide-open store, the meat went so fast, she didn’t even need refrigerators.
In the rusted iron smell of blood, warm breath still lingering on cow tongues laid out next to impeccable livers, people waited in line by the hundreds but she only sold bones shorn, cleaned till they shined. The pig’s whole head— snout, eyes open, teeth, lashes, ears— was all a delicacy, as she wrapped it with bare hands in wax paper, laid it on the scale, the whole nine pounds of it, while flirting with a customer.
The smoked pig’s feet she saved for the pastry vendor as they bartered. The prime pieces, for steak, she sold under the counter to friends or party officials who helped her get the job. The most coveted position in town, she admitted, holding out her hands like raw ground meat, nails broken, cuticles shredded.
Procession
I ask my mother to tell me the end of a story and she sips her tea, wonders about my international long-distance plan that lets us talk for hours.
When the whole village paced behind the ox-drawn cart decorated with dahlias, why did women whisper, untie their head scarves and tie them back?
A woman went to a crone still in the dark of dawn and by dusk she walked alone.
That time, the woman’s father brought her home; he stepped by his horse cart, hat in his hand. Her head rested on an old tapestry with faded bujori.
Nobody said anything. In the crowd, the strained face of the official sent to sign communist papers, file a report— facial muscles chiseled with foreboding.
Four Children
between two and seven are left alone for days, yet they survive, room empty, bare mattress on the floor.
The first day, the three boys and a girl rummage through the kitchen, search for leftovers, scavenge for bread. At night
they huddle, gather old blankets on the floor. Winter crackles, burns the line between inside and outside: in the fireplace, ice.
Listless and languid, feet blue, they move less, speak less, finagle together a snack of cardboard.
When a neighbor finds them, the youngest cannot cry. House redolent with fear. Scoured. Wafting.
Trails of dirt around their eyes, foreheads like broken glass. Too young to tell how long since mother went away.
Guardians of the Voroneţ Blue
The nuns of Voroneţ are mean: they chase the visitors away, resent the crowds who come to venerate but touch with dirty hands the walls that otherwise have withstood four centuries of rain and snow.
Some say the famous blue was made with barrels of plum vodka so that’s what gave the color stay, resilience and ardor.
Others claim it is the blood shed in the battles led by Stephen the Great who saved the land against the Turks and had the monastery built to celebrate his victory advised by Daniil the Monk.
The nuns know better: the fierce power of denial and renunciation, the giving in to arches and inner shadows, the fusing in of stenciled crowns, the sorrow in the eyes of saints painted in frescoes. Outside, some fool in 1859 scratched his name with a nail on the right side of the door.
Infinite Verbs
The only thing we have is verbs; everything else is sleep of vowels, fretting of chimes.
Doubt sifts the sky like snow, brings in silence of Gregorian songs, syntax of prayer we can’t translate.
We wonder if this is what we want: postponed fear, elusive bread, embryo.
We latch the door, try to keep out cursing words, and patch the gaps with adjectives and cups of tea.
The only thing we have is verbs; everything else is squandered summer running through our fingers as we brace ourselves for the sundry sounds of cold, emptiness crackling in the gaping stove. _____________________________________________
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