Poems by Adriana Boagiu

Adriana Boagiu is a poet whose lines carry a wordy town into flowery flurries of memory and eroticism, both ingenuous and insidious. Her sound skinning sonnets know how to allure and kill softly, while her irregular-iambic-pentameter or vers libre riffs shake and caress with mixed mercilessness and affection. I am happy to greet her shrewd and artful voice of which I am sure we are going to hear a lot more not after long.

Chris Tanasescu

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Skin Treatise on Transition

Craiova. Lagrange. Vectors. Pascal. And
the anatomy of the magnificent
frog. Et Goe, l’enfant terrible,
terrible comme la Langue Roumaine…

Repetition is the mother of learning
or was it the mother of platitude?!…
I remember my father’s fading voice:
“Utchites!…Utchites!…Utchites!…U!…”

Now I hear the humming of the trolley
And a Babylonia of melodies
And the sudden siren call of money
In the rhythm of my recondite thoughts:

How awfully alike intellectual
prostitution and self-fulfillment sound!…

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Lo -Li -Ta

Lo is for your looming angelic figure.
Li is for lustful lips like ripe tangerines.
Ta is for touching your ethereal
soul. My Lolita, my life, my heart, mine!…

There are moments when I smell his beckoning
voice piercing my breasts and I hear his
mature hand grabbing at my childhood
and when his hand is silent his eyes start

talking to me and they keep whispering
the alluring words: Lo-lii-ta, Lo-lii-ta!…
and then my other heart hurries to answer
but, strangely enough, falls into a deep,

indomitable sleep!…When I wake up,
I have forgotten all about my dream…

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The Southern Jewel

the proud Gypsy welcomes
the morning

with cries of
Multiculturalism

Pigtails flutter in the wind
and barely touch the
variegated garments

Dappled languages converge
with vapid remarks
of Marginalization

Begging life,
Singing sorrow,
Shouting identity,
Lamenting fate,
Aware of us,
the Multimillionaires of Doom.

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Mournful

Morose acquaintances beguiling inquietudes
Of lost morality in cruel, dead lovers’ hands.
A dream of demon love breaks asunder
Dispersing bits of blissful tragedy.
Deceitful damsels in distress inviting
Tiresome monologues about the incidence
Of death. A mad girl shouting in the street
About the philosophy of meat conceit.
A beggar lamenting the loss of his
Possession: a merry-go-round of moody genii.

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Hometown Hickey

Don’t cry, my love, I ran away because
of You! Because of your oppressive stench
of black pitch! And the irrelevance of your quietly
suffocating cements! And your greatly

commendable lack of pulse! And the grotesque
juxtaposition of your drowsy pink
and my vivid black! And your duplicate
sunrises like upturned sunsets in disguise!

Do you miss me in your lonely, sullen
nights? Can you hear I’m praying for you to
come back? Can you still taste the happiness
we shared on your saddened lips? There is something

I’ve been meaning to tell you: when you
left, a pink blossom fell into your hair…