Alina Ştefănescu, featured in the new Ocean State Review
Dream for Christina
“Breathe on me still, star, sister.”
—Randall Jarrell, “The Meteorite”
I am standing beside you in Voronca’s target-shooting shack
dressed as a seagull. You are folding a notebook page into
an octagonal shape and shaking your head. A wind demon
presses hair into our mouths and I am a hybrid who is trying
to explain that I flew over an ocean and massacred innocent
birds to stand inside the forest you wrote in stolen feathers
because I can’t trust anyone else to translate me
into myself. Am I stranger in person
as a bird dream
There is a shattered
eggshell near your sandal. There is a life that broke
open before it could be chosen. There is more tenderness
than one can fathom in wearing what never happened.
The wing I swallowed believes our bones have eons
to say to each other, and bracelets to knot, yet.
Alina Ştefănescu on “Dream for Christina“:
Form and content coincide: the lyre in me respects tempo in order to ruin time.
The poem emerged from a refusal of lines, borders, and boundaries, and it owes this formal energy to dreams, to dreaming—and to the pleasure of instrumentation (or the manner in which a piece is arranged for instruments).
The speaker meets the addressee on a page that imagines a mind outside the proximate and immediate. Part of this meeting was utterly coincidental, which is to say, driven by the content of the notebook page that first dreamt the poem. The other part was deliberately coincident, since the dream emerged from a refusal of lines, borders, and boundaries.
As a form, the dream insists on its own unboundedness. It defies the consequentialist lines we draw between dots on a timeline. It undoes daylight’s settled cartography and blurs the way in which we know ourselves.
In dreams, the solid image reveals itself to be a liquid, an ocean; the self as constructed for neoliberal citizenship falls away.
Only the imaginary matters.
Only the imagined is material.
In the music created by dreams, the images are the instruments. Writing requires one to select the instruments and create or manage relationships between them.
Form and content are shaped by the notebook page: the space where I think, feel, and write. Notebooking, as a practice, has its own motions and gestures that invoke the texture of ritual. I recognize myself in this medium, in its mediations between languages and places.
At that point where the symbolic and the real collide, “the image brings us into its presence,” wrote Jean-Luc Nancy. Randall Jarrell’s meteorite happened to fall on the same page as my notes on Christina Tudor-Sideri translation of Ilarie Voronca’s The Centaur Tree (Sublunary Editions).
The book and the fallen star scraped across the grilles of my mind.
Like many Romanian writers, Ilarie Voronca (a.k.a. Romanian-Jewish avant-garde poet Eduard Marcus) settled in Paris as an adult, where he took part in the French Resistance. As one who knew illness and died young of it, Voronca’s texts refuse to separate dreaming from being: the mind imagines the worlds that haven been stolen from it. The mind inhabits those impossibilities.
Technically, Christina is a stranger to me. Yet our strangeness is similar. Our imaginaries, whether textual or embodied, coincide in uncanny ways. She is both star and sister in the poem’s impossibly-possible sky.
Alina Ştefănescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. Her new poetry collection will be published by Sarabande in 2025. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.