Alina Stefanescu
1. THE DISPATCHLetter to Bucharest Concerning the Use of Blue in Paintings and Music
Dear Bucharest,
I keep dreaming the stench of summer light crawling over the outdoor market, the warmed botany of rotting flowers and bouquets of diesel fumes like an extended belch from your hidden stomach.
The ancient Greeks believed lightning was a language in which gods expressed their emotions. Composer Alexander Scriabin was fascinated by how gods spoke through light—and he sought to score it, to bring it to musical notation, to capture light and preserve it in music. Like Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin used E major to depict a soft blue oceanic tint which he associated with creation and divinity. Scriabin's efforts to score light as sound relied on a sort of proximate synaesthesia and palindromes. For example, he used a palindrome in The Fantasy Sonata where moonlight appears with the transposition of the moon in G sharp minor to the brighter blue of E major associated with the ocean. His love for the sea and the horizon appears repeatedly through his opus where he designates these natural topographies as sources of lucidity and clarity.
It was this blue I sought on the multiple metro stops and switches from Piata Universitatii to Belu Cemetery, where I couldn't find the right blooms to leave on my grandparents' graves. The floral situation around Belu was meager, mostly green plastic funerary wreaths manufactured in China by underpaid workers, the familiar underpaid, forever-green plastics I knew from the US. Only the smell of light maintains distance between the globalization of grief industries. The silk flowers last forever, the baba assured me. Thus did I pay her and abandon all hope that my flowers would rot into the soil which holds family members. Plastic and nylon do not rot—they remain alive, never rooted, eternal as the loneliness of statues and monuments.
The seriousness of blue is connected to the older man who lived in my neighborhood. I was 10. The man who kept doves was suspicious because he didn't do other things—he didn't mow his lawn, unload large brown grocery bags from his car, or wear different clothes for outings – and it was the failure to resemble his neighbors that made the dove keeping significant. It was a dove which hovered near the virgin Mary when she was impregnated by the deity, or by God who fobbed it off onto the Holy Spirit so that he could remain sexually pure and carnally innocent. I was 10 and Jesus was a virgin but God was not. The dove served as the intercessory sperm vessel—its whiteness and soft coos were a form of seduction that could ruin a woman's life by forcing her to give birth to an unwanted baby. Mary didn't want to carry Jesus—she merely agreed that she had no choice. And this absence of choice was backed by an angel. The dovekeepers' inability to commit to friendly conversation led me to suspect that he was being employed by the doves rather than tending them. This feeling didn't diminish on the summer weekend when he watered the grass around the cages while humming something which resembled a piece scored for church organs. My mother had sent me to ask him if our mail hadn't been misplaced in his mailbox. I watched the dovekeeper's lips move under his beard as he denied our mail's presence while the doves cooed and beat their wings against the cage. I could not see his mouth when he said they are a wonder of the doves, when he said they are a miracle. But I understood that his relationship with the doves must be one of love which prevented him from consenting to the wreck they made of his life, in some relation to the fear of having been visited by an angel. Perhaps I also understood that Mary wore Scriabin's blue in paintings so that we could imagine the doves cooing in E major.
I remembered the doves and the virgin when wandering through your biggest cemetery, Bucharest.
P and I held hands near the crypt of a stranger. We paused to sit on Nichita Stanescu's grave; I left a napkin smudged with a kiss from my bloodiest lipstick. I always soak my lips in crimson before visiting the dead. The shadow made us look like one body with a bridge at its midriff—two hands.
Gravity deforms us, I told P. The graves cringed when I laid the word gravity near them; the fence which kept the corpses from floating off into space stayed invisible. We are planets with invisible strings that keep us in orbit around each other, I told the dead poet. P was still mad at me for the enormous and miniscule things which occurred outside a bar last night.
If attraction is as reliable as gravity, and gravity is the power that saves us, Newton's laws fail us in the details, in the particulars of anticipating the motion of those two bodies. For there is the third body – the shadows separate from us, the silhouette on the poet's grave – which makes prediction even more fragile. I marveled at how Helene Cixous' third body threatens the balance or equilibrium between the two genders. A shadow disrupts the hope of equity.
P shook his head. No, he said, it's not our shadow who is the third body, it is your notebook; it is the word you use to describe and destroy us. There is always the possibility of detonation. The light is as bright and unforgiving as it was at the Ohio rest area where he asked me to marry him. I could not see his face because the sun scorched my eyes. But P–then, as now– wears sunglasses. He uses me like doves use old men and pious teens. He stares at the light without flinching.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYUni Ball vision needle micro in black ink
Notebooks
Edelweiss from Transylvania which is known as the Queen's Heart
Drafts in folders in a large basket
The ghosts of overwatered plants
Portrait of bilingual family from Sears
3. BIOGRAPHYAlina Stefanescu 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 poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.