Alina Stefanescu

Mysterium, As Engraved on Pope’s Tiara until the Reformation

a golden shovel involving Revelations 17:5

And so it begins to end. There—past the chair—
upon the floored mattress, his hands searched
her hair for wind. His eyes scoured her
forehead for omens. One scar in the left corner
was the stained window. Glass has its hued diction,
a color to clip silence’s virtue. He needs a conjurable
name to pin to the lyre, to blame for the lure, a specificity
written in neap tides, a tower of saltine crackers.
Mystery dies when read closely. But he invents anyway:
Babylon, the brided lyric, groomed to expiate
the sex in the bar bathroom, against the wall, the
great suspicion that he was less cunning. And she knew
the surrounding tower of his scorn. Would he compare her to his
mother? Another mattress? A facsimile breast in the flesh
of grown mirrors? Night shelters its writhing
harlots with eyes like accidental sharps (mine among them)
and still, we refuse to accept the instrument contrives
abominations, the scythed music
of our predicates. First there was
the irresistible honeyed mouth—the whole
earth was shaped to hold it.

The Octave’s Creation Myth

for A, who told me an octave wasn’t enough

It starts with the scintillating instant::
the first time he reaches to loose your long
hair from the band : and how unrepentant
the length caressing your shoulders, the song
of everything becoming his hands ::: grant
his lips, his desire to glimpse you among
statues ::: let him demolish the distance
this Once which begins benumbed : with tongue.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.