Romana Iorga

October 2026 | poetry

[Everything is close]

After Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (III, 20)

Everything is close
today, the watery glow
from the daffodils
blooming on the balcony,
the wind inflating the green
sail of the curtain,
the neighbor’s dog
yapping again at a passer-by.

I knew something was wrong
when his bark turned
from annoying to cute.
I’m thawing.
I feel it in my bones.

I’m too close to the rain
that’s been falling for days,
turning flesh to water.
I’m liquid, a jellyfish,
eerily transparent.

Let the city pour through me,
I want nothing of myself.

Whoever I was,
that woman held a box
in her hands and in it, her heart.
Unused for so long,
it slowly turned to stone.

Romana Iorga

Originally from Chișinău, Moldova, Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024), a woman made entirely of air (dancing girl press, 2025), Auz simplu (Semne Press, 2000), and Poemul sosirii (Glasul Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in The Nation, Lake Effect, New England Review, Salamander, RHINO, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Iorga’s new poetry collection, Witness Protection, won the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2027.

Sylvie Oleta

October 2026 | poetry

Terminus Rotgut

I have the recording scratched bloody as a red record groove into my body, the totality of my body, a needle sending resonant, flowing memory through every vein, cut in rows, scratched, recorded and played, scratched recorded and played, the blood running in and through, drawn back by the writhing mass at my center, the organless weight of consumption, antithetical to being, antithetical to anything but driving the needle, driving the etching and scratching and playing, tasting whiskey and blood and piss and vomit in a kiddie pool of off-color sick-like salmon drool, driven by that corporealizing phantasm of my muffled grunts and his labored breathing, his piston machine desire flowing not through but into, driving like a nail laying track for an express destined to run indefinite, always in, deeper into the dynamite blown cavity of my cervix, over the precipice, into the train graveyard, the organless weighted writhing mass, crashing, compounding, a pear of agony wrought from tortured shrapnel…

Sylvie Oleta

Sylvie Oleta is a poet and fiddler residing in Charlottesville, Virginia. She once fell off a cliff while hunting for the wreckage of a B-25 Mitchell and is now forever grateful for conveniently placed trees.