Andrei Guruianu is a Romanian-born writer and the author of several collections of poetry and a memoir (Metal and Plum, Mayapple Press 2010). His poetry and prose have appeared in dozens of publications in the U.S. and abroad. In the past he has served as editor and publisher of the literary journal The Broome Review and guest editor of the internationally distributed magazine Yellow Medicine Review. In 2009 and 2010 he served as Broome County, NY’s first poet laureate. Guruianu has taught literature and writing courses at several colleges and universities in New York and Illinois, currently working as Language Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He lives in Queens, NY. More of his work and publications can be found at here. ---------
Cornhusk Fires
I am convinced the life raft of descendency has sprung a leak. I bully the old and the infirm, the dead and the dying, to lend me what it is they have left before they forget where they’ve put it. They settle inherited debts with a spit-in-the-palm and a cornhusk because it is easier to burn on a cold and bleak December.
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The spit wears well on a pant leg. I plug the hole set it on fire walk the long night wearing the smoke in my pocket. The coat on my back a patchwork suturing, the future hanging on a thread of blame.
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I waste away as I waste my words that come out slick as gin and just as playful on the tongue. They will bring you no warmth. They will feed no one. A book about hunger never sells for a loaf of bread. You can starve choking on the rumpled page and the belly grows tight like a stillborn fist. Your chest a nest abandoned, blown open to the wind.
For the Daily Winners
Before the day is over, as my life hovers over metaphor vested in shallow rivers, my soul blushes in urban ghetto of red brick and steel. Smells of cheap tobacco and exhaust, violet sky, roads accidentally ideal. Virtual sweat. I come home and empty what there is of me on a porcelain tray—in all of my pockets there is some trace of time invested, time given willfully or otherwise—crumbs, lint, coin, folded message, the warmth I am capable of without even trying.
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I miss being now and I miss being then. This split second that has just passed. Living in places where long distance calls are necessary. The sound of a telephone ringing in the other room, the way everything stopped then, the way the rubber cord stretched and coiled, that frail bond fashioned by the sound of a familiar voice.
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Empty quiet streets so you can sleep mean the city’s shelters are filled with animals that might or might never escape. Rescue is sugarcoated sound bite. The ones outside on pink and blue leashes are trying to remember what it was like before they were born. They piss on everything and everywhere as if to say that language is myopic at best. It is a false prophet; it promises what it cannot give without the body, this final vestige, ravenous hope.
First Sign
Snow steadies itself parallel to the eye. The mythical road of eternal winter is condemned to bear witness to laughter and struggle, the murderous groans of those who cannot help but say what they feel. Unbearable cold is a time for the civilized to confess, tear through this labyrinth of the living with enough zeal to annihilate the cross.
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And destruction of peace comes with a wave of white calm, branch leading branch into night’s nothingness unleashing the dark boundary of faith. Fantasies of the unseen leading us like sheep to slaughter.
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There are not enough words to last us through the endless night and then beyond into the dance. With sulfur and smoke we gather our breath and green the language to keep it pure, kitchen knives at the ready beneath dresses and blood-orange robes. Then the smile of remembered fear will give us all sufficient reason to share in the pulse and throb of intimate secrets. The things on this earth of any importance reduced to summaries of lovemaking and awkward family dinners—
all with the year’s first snow falling on painted eyelids and the neighborhood square—narcissism on pedestals and a shriveled wreath for the cause.
Partially Open, Folded in Parts
On the floor there is a man folded in parts who doesn’t want to live any longer. The man is a lagoon inside the harbor of a woman’s coat that fits him like the perfect lie. Wordplay always schemes against logic to make us more beautiful when down on our knees, face looking for the smallest sign of reason. Any shape that will hold the wine, a wall of empty numbers and figures, a small altar of flame.
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It’s a good night to play the piano. And whatever else can serve as an instrument—the face of this table, a knot of bone inside your breast, the useless clawing of the leaves along the gutter. Ancient floorboards echo with boot soles and leather, a scuffed toe box that has kicked too many pebbles down abandoned roads.
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Outside, an early fall burrows in the hills, there’s cold air coming through the cracks, there’s time you didn’t even know you could waste. We eat the crust and crumbs despite ourselves while the moon shines on in its monochrome wisdom.
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Above a row of dirty black and white keys your long pale fingers dream of water and birdsong. With a single note you call silence by its very name. I can speak your kind of music but I cannot understand it. And for that I am the poorer beast.
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I don’t think that a warm sky and fields are the answer though I’m not against wishing for miracles. Partially open, folded in parts, impossibly close to myself. Too near to what I know. A few friends, laughter when the mouth by itself is not enough, glint of muscle pulsing beneath yellow light. A good night to play the piano.