Laura Damian
Future job prospect
How about an invisible bird nesting in the old ficus tree
at the end of the street. You know, the one that leans
against the school wall. I would apply for an entry-level position
on the bottom branches, the light heavy with green,
chirping allowed and encouraged from sunrise to down.
With my organizational skills, the fellow sparrows would
sing higher every time pedestrians walk by so they stop
and pay us a smile. I could negotiate with the wind
to blow gently and leave a small white cloud above us,
the perfect drawing model for the 5-year-olds looking
through their class window. I would oversee the blossom
like a Victorian mother hurrying her daughters to pinch
their cheeks to be courted. And maybe you’d argue
our inconspicuous flowers are not a threat to the violet
jacarandas around the corner, but you’ll come back to us
in a month or so, to breathe in our shadow and spy together
on the old couples—women with stoic faces carrying
on their shoulder the hand of their beloved, convinced
they are being guided through life. At noon, when the only
lingering sounds are the echoes of teens—#MyFuckingMom
ToldMeToTidyMyRoom—I would plunge into the debate
between the cocky bunch of birds of paradise and the austere ficus,
the underground mycorrhizal network humming with controversy.
The next day
Boa feathers scattered in the hotel elevators
like early morning dream fragments—blown
by hot wind on the silent streets, spilling
from garbage cans, even the train. You
dedicated months looking for the perfect
concert outfit; stuck brilliant hearts
to your jeans, bought 3 t-shirts and
a red boa online from China, practiced
makeup in the bathroom for months.
“Glitter on the cheeks too, you have to be
a real fan to understand it, mamma!”
You wore his necklace under uniforms
and pajamas, and his real-sized
cardboard dummy—Alba’s gift for
your birthday—stiffly smiled at you
until it bent and fell on the floor.
He whispered in your headphones
“I’m coming” and you whispered back
the letters of his songs untuned. We
woke at 5am, took a fast train to Madrid
and a bus, mangled in the buzzing waves
of 65 thousand joyous people sweating
happily. He was there. You cried,
you sang, you yelled, you danced.
You saw him. Almost. He vanished,
leaving behind the echo of his songs,
sore throats and boa feathers. Now what.
Liver biopsy chronicle
I’m a mutant. My friends laugh when I tell them
Magneto could not take me down in a fight;
my liver accumulates copper, a superpower
my genetic disease awarded me. Being a mutant
is an attractive feature to doctors. Not
in a romantic or sexual way, unfortunately.
One can still dream on a freezing hospital bed
when a handsome surgeon approaches
with a 16-cm pointy instrument. “It’ll be quick”
he says. The walls of the operation room bend,
time collapses, and the screams of George,
a pig my grandparents sacrificed for Christmas
40 years ago, burst into my inner ear. Turns out
you cannot bury the sound of death
under a pillow. George was like a hairy pink
marshmallow, liked to play ball, chase the cats,
and once his nose piercing got caught on
my bike chain. With infinite love my grandma
unhooked him, rubbed his belly—same love
she rubbed salt on the slices of fat before
letting them cure 6 weeks. And his liver,
oh his liver made a delicious pie.
Laura Damian is a Romanian-Spanish poet residing in Barcelona, whose recent work has been published in Perceptions Magazine. A mother of two teenagers and a dog, she works in finance and enjoys sharing poetry with her colleagues.
