Father Dirt

By Mihaela Moscaliuc

Mihaela Moscaliuc's lyric debut unveils Communist and post-Communist Romanian life, recounting experiences and landscapes like a true wanderer. Romantic and spellbinding, her quest to understand language, origin, and country unites celebration with mourning, the sacred with the profane, apathy with compassion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Release date: Oct 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948579742

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Father Dirt and Immigrant Model and the translator of Romanian poet Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper. Moscaliuc's essays have appeared in History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics, The Task of Un-Masking: Essays on Poetry and Race, and Globalizing Cultures: Theories and Paradigms Revisited. She received her Ph.D. from University of Maryland, her M.F.A. from New England College, and her M.A. from Salisbury University. Moscaliuc is an assistant professor of English at Monmouth University and is on the core faculty of Drew University's MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

Book preview

HOW TO ASK FOR MY HAND AT MY GRANDMOTHER’S GRAVE

What a waste of space, you murmur as the train cuts

through a cemetery whose halves rest like drowsy wings

between two pine forests, then spooky as our window

zips by faces smiling from porcelain plates glued to crosses.

You’ve crossed the ocean to marry me, so I cannot say

I knew only one of them, but they are all mine,

these dead turned strigoi who’ll not return

to their bodies because the earth’s too loud

and the town has betrayed them.

But I have to warn you—

We carry cemeteries on our heads,

in our bellies, round our ankles.

We carry them to work

and we carry them to sleep

and when we make love

they moan, they rattle, they sing.

When our spines start sinking we spit

and curse and dance off the pain.

When I bring you to grandmother’s grave,

behind the Dacian fortress, she’ll be armed

with questions: how hardy your love, how soft your fingers,

and your dead, how do you spoil them?

After you cup your hands to catch the soul,

she’ll want to know, how do you release it?

Don’t tell her about ashes thrown to winds, don’t