On translation
Clara Burghelea
A mouth is a beautiful thing to be born into, a potent realm of tastes, wordlings,
the eeries, everything that burns to flesh out. You learn to move the tongue like
the sea, ebbing the edges, one lap after the other, then flowing back into the unuttered.
The way a mouth can trace the hanging fruit of doubt before it congeals into the mind,
fall as if held, roll nape to forehead, a teething little mouse tracing fallacies to their root,
before it wheels back into ink dreams. This sheet of paper stands witness to the way
the mouth does things with words, their stillness and stubbornness alike, poking at
their fleshy cores, biting into their sanctity of solitude. A palimpsest of lipped out
strikes, the blurred space between mis-en-scènes and intentions, tonguing the unsaid
before the unsaid gains weight, and all swerving sways softly turn flux into solid matter.
Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet, translator, and editor. Her second poetry collection, Praise the Unburied, was published with Chaffinch Press in 2021.