Clara Burghelea

Leaving

is the dark growing around the soft edges
of the body until it becomes a splinter,
shadows ringing the eyes, stalactited sighs
in the night heat, cold moon trickling down
the treetops, the air inside the lungs, a weight
of bats, the throat, a messy residue of words
unspoken, words thrown up in the air, the buzz
of cicadas luring the eardrums into numbness.

Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her second poetry collection Praise the Unburied was published with Chaffinch Press in 2021. She is Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation.