Mihaela Moscaliuc

Empathy test

May, 2020

I did not expect to ace it but was convinced I’d pass—

based not on well-earned moral ground

but thanks to wiring that circuits my spine,

the charge at the slightest mention of wounds

or at the sight of beggars and fallen drunks or,

almost as easily, in the vortex of another’s

happiness. Still, recently I’ve diminished

into imagining harm, assembling torments,

researching spells, seeking the counsel

of my goats, pirating their arsenal of hexes.

When the president’s malevolence

breaks the news again, I inhabit

the Middle Ages scribe

hunchbacked by virtue of his work

at a table lit only by natural light

(as candles endanger the pages),

eyesight failing by virtue of this work,

nerves pinched, viscera squeezed

by virtue of a work unfinished

until he’s slipped into the frontispiece

that last, self-assigned, calligraphic curse:

cleft by demon swords, eyes gouged out,

devoured by hell fires

be the one tempted to desecrate this spine.

“Empathy test” is in memory of Freddie Gray and George Floyd. Some information is taken from Sarah Laskow’s “Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, With Horrifying Book Curses” (November 9, 2016, Atlas Obscura).

Mimo’s Mango

According to the 2017 national immigration census, 751.080 people of Haitian origin lived in the Dominican Republic; each year thousands more cross the border from Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, to find temporary work.

In season, mangos overripe with the velocity
and constancy of poverty. Mimo’s head basket,
never lighter than twenty pounds even by mid-day,
balances the ones bueno ahora mismo, mi amor,
with those best a few days ago.

When she halts to unload my purchase,
she tightens the coiled orange headwrap
that alleviates the burden, sips warm water.
I ask to see again a picture of Jenia, her daughter.
She rubs the photo’s tooth gap, smiles,
then hoists the cornucopia on the adjusted halo.

Today I awakened to a porch lit with green mangos.
Mimo’d missed Jenia’s first steps, first words,
but won’t the loss of the last milk tooth.
She may have reached Haiti by dawn,
her scarf unnoosed into a one-way footbridge.
She’ll risk it back, over or through
the murky shallows of Massacre River.

Assimilation: Lamancha goat

Descended from the Murcian goat
passaged to California by Spanish missionaries,
named after the label stamped on containers
but dubbed mona monada, little monkey, cutie, freak,
she assimilated swiftly into American mainstream
under the tutelage of Mrs. Eula Fay Frey,
who saw much value in her minimum tendency
to dawdle or get into mischief.

Roman-nosed and docile by all accounts,
she was still not spared charges of inferiority:
those ears—alien, elfish—and those teats too,
pointing forward and outward
(which, between us, sister, rock!).
And how she had aced, in 1903, that Paris Goat Show—

Mona Monada
uprooted from a Quixote mesa
then crated adrift: your mills’ wind-catching sails
have since been lacquered for tourists
and the ocean’s too bloated with bodies to take you back.
Your milk’s been seized to sweeten seized land.
Mona Monada, hold on to your thrifted look,
to the cracks in the hearth and who pushes through.

Refugee Song

Sixteen lost at sea survived
at her breast.

When her mind tangled in seagrass,
lips kept the milk flowing:
dying women, men, ghostling of newborn
afloat among damselfish.

The shore pushed them back
toward lands poisoned by war.
The milk ran out of bodies.
*
Father, all you ever did
was gorge on my flesh.

My belly grew eyes
but the pelvis shrank,

thinned by vinegar
and grazing nails.

What am I to call
your hunger,

the teeth marks
clotted with milk,

the shore I barely reached?

From Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)

Alien Resident

My mother rescues bitter cherries off Queens Boulevard.
She catches and hoists them in the net of her pleated skirt,
cradles them to her employer’s kitchenette.
On a leather barstool that spins into night, she pits and pits,
keeps pace with the vermicular fanfare, bitter blood
under nails, petite castanets cackling in the dry mouth.
On the trenches of dawn, crushed flesh dissolves in the sugar bath
as she nods, on one elbow, to the squeals of bedroom doors.
She spoons coffee, keeping count aloud, and pours milk for kids’ pancakes
as instructed, with a measuring cup. The perfect scale of her eyes
she wastes on homespun sanitizers —2/3vinegar 1/3 peroxide—
for sinks, counters, her Eager Beaver, his dumbbells.
She jogs through the day in bark slippers, elm
embossed with perfectly knifed hearts.
What’s she doing here, my mother, in a toddler cot,
apron pockets lined with shriveled fruit worms, jars of preserve
ticking under the mattress like hand grenades.

From Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)