by Alina Stefanescu

One is born from
what has borne your
idea, or pinned you to the pretense
of its bleached shore.

Ingenuous shame—as in the leaf mistaken
for a feather, or the ambiguity
misconstrued as mystique.

The Angel of Clouds is also known
as the angel who has no other name
which is not the same as being the angel
who remains nameless.

A poem can only sustain its blissed
meta for a whist’s fist before
sound seeps out the corners.

Every image in script
wants to be endless. Wilderness
in how an hourglass
is just a yard being conquered
by its limitations.

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 alinastefanescuwriter.com.