Toni Chira (2003) is a young Romanian poet. He won the Poetry Prize at the 2019 edition of the Young Writers' Colloquia. Chira is co-organizer of the TRILL Cenacle, of the Online Poetry Marathon 2020 and of the SAD Festival. His work has been published in the magazines Poesis International, Vatra, Dlite and Fragmented Voices.
I pressed my palm against the wall and waited for my pulse.
For a while, until I unbuckled my belt.
I was looking up intently.
The light in a public toilet, the light in a train station.
In such moments I need a watch
or at least an empty spot in the middle of the forehead,
where to go, when it comes to them,
CFR employees with their leather bags.
Did my prostate colapse?
Two minutes and the first jet comes out shily.
Someone had filled the wall with graffiti.
Large writing: IULIAN.
He could just as well write mycosis.
I can't stand the idea of a basement.
I do better on the surface, even in the dark:
I stick out my iron or even plastic tongue
and pull on the opposite end of the lock.
Everything happens spontaneously,
although I have some reservations,
if a car with its headlights on passes
and a rubberized hand or stick
they will turn on my back,
for order.
*
1 The political children of our parents
„The source informs you about the fact that meetings from the house of culture of a group of people from the locality and other localities who call themselves a cenacle but this is a lie because we know what a cenacle we saw at the comrade Păunescu and this was not a cenacle, it was a gathering of people who kept reading from some sheets and said that it was literature but I didn’t understand anything... so I think that these people have some problems with their minds but it’s not hostile that they didn’t talk about foreign posts and did not speak ill of socialism, they don’t seem to know what kind of world I live in... Matache
2. 11. 1985 „
A black dwarf closes the range.
He is not a writer, but an affiliate,
He’s not a regular artist, just a performer.
His ideas stop at the freshly whitewashed wall,
In the wax-white wall.
Listen to „the microphones slowly coming down from the ceiling.”
Our tape recordings,
Evasive meetings at the House of Pioneers,
Left hand covering face,
Right hand covering face,
Two thick lips whispering through the wet gauze.
The black dwarf has a serious face.
He is interested in multilateral development,
Equality, petty reverberations.
Sitting next to us, he looks for ideological sources
Of our feelings.
He rebukes us conscientiously. Laugh.
He carries his ideas over the names of the dead.
„Security did not exist.
There was only one country with too many lichens,
In which the ax tails
They grew directly from the trees „,
In which the zeal supplement was distributed to the children
As anaphora,
And the culture unfolded incognito.
Censorship did not exist.
There were only a few people enslaved to the regime,
Who loved patriotic poetry
And popular celebrations.
There were only editorial policies that contradicted writers,
But without doing them any harm.
Hertha Muller did not exist,
Neither Monica Lovinescu nor Virgil Ierunca.
Free Europe did not broadcast in my home.
„Ostinato” was never written.
There were no forms of protest,
Implicitly dissident literature.
Spring was coming to Romania. The magnolia was blooming.
*
2 The Apocalypse of Sandburg
„The manuscript raises serious ideological issues and is a literary disappointment”
I am the interpreter. I’m the aggressor.
I discovered the pituitary gland,
Occipital nerve and orbitals inside the atom.
Do you know that everything great in the world was made through my work?
I stood with my handkerchief in front of the Statue of Liberty
And I wiped it off.
I hugged her to my chest and laid her on the bed.
I put the pillow on her mouth and pressed.
Terrible storms pass over me. And I forget.
My ink dries in wallpapers.
And I forget.
In confidential and mundane tabloids.
And I forget.
From my barracks they went to the front
The White Army and the Red Army.
My magnates financed the Civil War.
They also coined the term „non-aggression”.
The term „charter” and other privileges
Of the modern world.
There are no more poets.
There are no more those who saw poets.
Those who saw their poems without resentment
As they gritted their teeth
The brown clothes of the bartenders,
Worn-out tables and extinguished darkness
In hot, cheap beer for lunch.
Then they laughed. From one neighborhood to another –
Smoking bites, stained sleeves
And the fear of being discovered now, now,
When life is full of magic,
When people hold screwdrivers in their arms
And wrenches, steering wheels
And artisan firecrackers.
*
Like my first love poems
They were torn to pieces and thrown in the trash,
Here I am lighting my cigarette again
And saying, like Cristi Popescu:
„I will ask to see you again,”
But not anyway, but coming out of the smoke
With blue shoes on,
With shortness of breath and breasts
Illustrated with wildflowers.
This time I don’t have the courage.
The wet napkin in the ashtray turned black,
Next to it – my poetry books.
All over, like a dome.
I remodeled the table surface.
I write in the center, just under the chandelier.
It’s noon, I have the curtains drawn
And the light bulb on.
I repeat: this time I do not have the courage.
I could make a joke about the whole situation.
I would soothe the atmosphere,
I would leave the reproaches for another day.
Even if my image leaves something to be desired,
When things settle down I’ll be back.
I will not pass the Olpret for only wood.
I won’t look at the garbage on the other bank.
In the bed of the brook many stars have faded.
This time I don’t have the courage.
I never had a personality
Handwriting.
I did not study semiotics, decadent poets
And Eliot’s quartets.
The only love poem I managed
It was my tone near you.
*
The black dwarf suffers from dyslexia.
He speaks emphatically about his role on earth,
About fairness and her big arms,
Stretched out like a canvas,
About the hypersensitivity of the lower classes.
We recognize him by the roar.
He was distracted, climbing on the opposite of current speech.
The twinkle in his eye resembles the Battle of Zama.
The Romans set Carthage on fire, looted it
And they destroyed it in six days.
Then they showed him where he was.
The citizens sold them as slaves.
The dwarf recalls. He walks through the arched room.
Oh my! The greatness of past civilizations.
Above – the panoply of hunting weapons.
Once upon a time, wild boars were hunted in these places,
Deer and wolves.
Even now, if you climb a hill,
See, in the distance, the Rodna Mountains.
Silence comes with changing speech.
At the House of Pioneers,
Where they speak in an evasive tone,
Where the conversations are recorded on the tape recorder,
And state-regulated art,
Where the state is no longer involved,
And the assumed freedom becomes a state,
And the assumed freedom becomes a state,
And the assumed freedom becomes...
Translated by Andrea Apostu
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