Before Dawn

I take the stand in front of you,
my body, old tree,
grown from an undisclosed time.
Sky pours around like jazz,

A festival of stars between two ribs
talking to each other the sweet language
of ashes. Fall comes to my mind:
wandering in my mother’s eyes,

green first, then yellow, then red,
keeping up with the music,
the branches, the wood burning inside.
Inside of inside, me too, like a vulture.

My mother opens her eyes,
the music stops, the planet bleeds,
my image staggers in disarray.
The pain comes later with the body

A word I can’t spell.

ISBN 1-59661-005-0
24 pages $9
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu was born in Romania. She has a Ph.D. in French from the University of Bucharest and an M.A. in French from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a lecturer in French at Northwestern University. She has written scholarly articles on Beckett, Ionesco, and others. She has published three previous chapbooks and publishes regularly in major literary publications.