Poetry by Andreea Ceplinschi

      Vincent Parsons CC




Motherless Daughter Excommunicates Herself from the Table

I don’t know GOD, but HE knows my grandmother when she crosses her bosom three times quick going down to the dirt cellar, where HE always rises for her from buckets of turnips and potatoes, between barrels of pickled cabbage and green tomatoes. I don’t know HIM, but HE used to drink plum rachiu with my uncle on Christmas Eve while they slaughtered the pig, signing a cross in the air with the butcher knife before it touched the pig’s throat, and though every year my uncle did the slitting and the pig did the bleeding, we all had to thank GOD for putting food on the table. I never asked how HE knew my mother, I believe they had an affair when she moved to Spain where rich people could pay her for cooking, cleaning, and mothering their brood, while at home we still had to thank HIM for putting food on the table, even though we bought it with the money she sent, had to still thank HIM when she got cancer, which HE gave to her, because that’s something only a lover would do and I suspect HE could have been my real father, why else would she insist HE help me when I called to tell her about moving further and further away, buses and planes, countries and strangers, bottles and razor blades.

I’ve never known GOD, but HE seems to know me sometimes, with the back of HIS hand so I understand why people call him Father, and I can taste HIM when my nose bleeds. It tastes like Christmas back home, where HE always has a seat at the table, and I no longer care if HE keeps it.

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I Want to Confess

that I hate my dead mother for having been my mother
                              the way she was. Growing up
I hated her four jobs, how she never checked my homework,
how she didn’t believe me when I wanted to die,
how she shut the kitchen door to smoke menthols with her guests,
               while dad’s friend bounced me on his knee on his way to the bathroom
               and sometimes slipped my hand inside the hardness of his open fly
               his army green corduroy pants sinking stripe patterns into my six-year-old thighs.

how she didn’t let me die                          my hair green    , so I shaved it off
                                                                             pierced my bellybutton with a safety pin in the dark:
how all I wanted was for her to see me with kindness, see me 
               with an open hand caressing cheek skin, or just to slap me, please
               put noise in the place I never screamed.

I hated her for being so sad that she could keep silence for days
how she turned me invisible     no matter how hard I pricked and cut
and how I went ahead and didn’t need her anymore and I hate
how I still wanted her when she left to mother-for-hire in another country.

I hate that loving someone else’s children made her remember me again
how she begged for calls more often – 
               the pretend plight of immigrant fucking mothers with immigrant fucking offspring
               living countries apart until they forget home and the reasons they left it –
               pain by pain I still hate her, the family tradition of righteous abandonment

               and that we’re not so different, her and I.

I hate her cancered tits on my chest, her white-skinned fat across my belly,
her thinning hair and brittle fingernails, her high blood pressure,
the ghost of her hand                          never close to my cheek,
                the hurting                                the men I love 
                                                                       when they bounce me on their knees 
                                                                       and tell me where to put my hands

the hurting                       the hurting                                the want for a hand 
                                                                                                      to slap me out of my body    
carve my flesh into the silence of being left     alone

because maybe that’s all mother ever wanted too:
nothing to clean, no meals to cook, no homework to check,
no children asking to die on the other side of the door,     
                while she too weighed dying against walking away.

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Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian immigrant writer, photographer, graphic designer, waitress, and kitchen witch living and working at the tip of Cape Cod. Her writing includes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, published and forthcoming in Solstice Literary Magazine, 86logic, One Art, Wild Roof Journal, The Quarter(ly), The Keeping Room, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at www.poetryandbookdesign.com
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