Miruna Fulgeanu

Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being

we eat soured milk on the pier.
the dusk has one will, which is calcium.

we hear spirits lifting off lake
like bone dust returning home.

later in bed, I will retrieve something
I’ve lost ~ pay for it with my disappearance.

again will dream of death by blue water,
cover my mouth with another. a secret ~

I like it here so much that I’ve already
marked our graves in the yard.

another ~ even as we sit here wavering,
there is a weird ellipse in the spoon.

by morning, I will have been eaten by salmon,
of interest only to historians of hunger ~

Growth

Our belovéd teacher has invited us to a black-tie ceremony, and
we are honoured. After figs and real champagne, we find our
seats in the auditorium. The anticipation is tangible. Finally our
teacher steps onto the stage wheeling behind him a portable
ultrasound machine, followed by his round-bellied wife. A voice
calls out from the audience: Are you having another baby?

Let’s find out, shall we, he teases to tremendous applause. Once
the applause dies down, he smears the gel onto his wife’s stomach,
then begins to perform an ultrasound. The machine is
connected to a projector, so that we can all see the enlarged
image on the big screen. But what appears on the screen is not
the shape of a fetus – it is a cartoon dog wearing a green hat. Ah,
it seems we only have a tax dog, the teacher laughs
embarrassed, as a tax dog

is something you have in your belly when you haven’t paid your
tax. I turn to share a laugh with my sister, but she is upset and
shimmers faintly with rage.

Workshopping the poem ‘GROWTH’

 

One perceptive commenter observes that the phrase tax dog –
whether consciously or not – is only a few letters removed from
tax dodging. Another enjoys seeing the teacher exposed for
who they really are, i.e., a tax dodger. A third similarly notes
the satisfaction of seeing him humiliated for what he has done.
Overall, the surreal nature of the poem is appreciated, together
with its exploration of student-teacher power dynamics and its
humour (although not clear if this is intentional?).

With no exceptions, all readers assume that it is the teacher who
has committed tax evasion, rather than the wife or perhaps the
two of them as a couple with joint finances, thus perceiving the
wife as a

surrogate for his guilt and, significantly, as deserving receiver
of his deserved punishment. Two people ask if the poem is
based on a dream.

Miruna Fulgeanu is Romanian-born poet and translator based in London. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, London Magazine and Poetry London, and perverse among others. In 2023, She won the Oxford Poetry Prize and in 2024 the Patricia Eschen Prize for Poetry. I am a DYCP awardee, as well as a member of the current Southbank New Poets Collective.

Kate wrote the following about her poems:

These poems are from a sequence called ‘The Scaredy Kate Poems’. Scaredy Kate is a persona; my frightened child self. She speaks in the third person — her voice is not quite hers, and not quite mine. She is anxious, but longs to discover how to live freely and fiercely in the world.

I had written my way through my treatment for breast cancer in 2020 — the Covid year. My notebook was my only companion in waiting rooms and wards. The result was ‘MX SIMP’, a pamphlet published by Mariscat Press in 2023. When treatment ended, when there were no more waiting rooms or wards, I felt adrift. Recovery was a gnawing fear of recurrence. I needed a new figurative language to articulate that terror. Thus Scaredy Kate was born.

Scaredy Kate sounds like that childhood taunt ‘scaredy cat’. Do I sound unforgiving of my cowardly self? I was! But I also wanted to claim her — fear was such an unrelenting, consuming experience that I knew I had to speak from it, rather than silence it. The poems are me being brave about being cowardly.

The title of ‘What Scaredy Kate Does’ echoes Susan Coolidge’s novel ‘What Katy Did’. I hated that book as a child. I was not that Katy — unfailingly good and patient. Of course, the novel is also about recovery: Katy falls from a swing and injures her spine so badly she can’t walk. Eventually, after years of goodness, she is rewarded and walks again. In my poem, Scaredy Kate is angry and impatient: she refuses to accept her broken body. Other people foil her plans and she is forced towards some kind of truce.

I was a good student of hypochondria before cancer; an excellent one after. Every ache, every pain was a sign. When I fell and bruised my ribs, I was convinced that the cancer was back. I was as loyal to this story as a dog to its cruel master. ‘What Scaredy Kate Knows’ is about the relief of not knowing — of letting go of the seeming certainties one hangs onto. I wrote it after a winter storm when my local river burst its banks and flooded my usual way home. I was forced to find a new path — to walk a route I didn’t know, to embrace uncertainty.

‘Scaredy Kate Resized’ describes the particular, peculiar experience of a mastectomy. The tight skin across my chest which reminded me of putting on a wetsuit. It’s also about accepting the new body and choosing to live in it.