Five poems by Lidia Zadeh Petrescu

THE AMPUTATED CITY

history has been put up for auction
together with its bloodstains
and its inconsistent losses of memory

the world sits in an electric chair
waiting for its hour of death
to be officially confirmed

heroes are moved into storage
among dusty unresolved files
poets will also be relocated disciplinarily
into a damp basement without echo
because they have not paid taxes on metaphors

churches have been ordered
to reduce the miracle by half
and the price of candles
that burn with emergency flames

you still exist as a footnote
in the treatise on defeat
but you breathe on credit
in a world that taxes even air
and if the end comes
ask it to take a waiting number

the apocalypse begins
at counter nine

THE POEM BENEATH THE SKIN

words enter my bloodstream
like a long hospital needle
whose metal I feel
beneath the skin of morning

poetry no longer shouts aloud
it barely whispers now
aphasic

like a jammed device
the syllables have been washed
of blood and memory
until they remained white
like forgotten bandages

poets are sent
to a ward without windows
where metaphor
is treated like a fever
with clinical patience

and I
carry in my mind
an asylum of words
rocking slowly
between life
and diagnosis

SYMPTOMATOLOGY

madness begins politely
with a cup washed to discoloration
with a table wiped ten times
until the wood loses its memory

I smile
and that reassures those around me
the mad must appear clean
otherwise they frighten
the others in the ward

my thoughts gnaw at the walls
they are elegant rodents
dressed in Sunday dresses
but underneath
they have iron teeth

I am always told
breathe, count to ten, be patient
but ten is a locked room
in which I have already died
my madness does not break plates
it washes, washes, washes
until nothing remains of me
except order

AUTOPSY OF A DIAGNOSIS

they opened my soul
with a single word
poetic disorder
they removed the dreams
weighed them
declared them dysfunctional

my heart was found
it seems it was
too sensitive for this era
the soul was declared
non-compliant
with sanitary regulations
madness, they said,

is a genetic error
but this
is only the truth
without skin
and truth
when it breathes freely
always looks
like a public
danger

SURVIVAL PROTOCOL

in the morning
they check my pulse
then allow me to breathe
out of mercy

the nurses speak to me
with their plastic voices
as to a fragile object
that must be protected

my mother comes every day
dressed in normality
to bring me
order
confidence
and a courageous smile
this is how she tells me
that I am well
as if well-being
were a vertical position

but I
am still here
because death
requested additional documents
and I filled out
the forms incorrectly
this is how I survive
not out of hope
but because of a manufacturing error
that has not yet
been detected