Mihaela Moscaliuc

Growing up in Romania, though we lived in a small prefab town flat, I got to play and sleep in wildflower meadows often, and the slopes along my street were covered in wild grasses, yarrow, thistle, and daisies high enough for hide & seek, first kisses, graves for stray kittens. The grapevine crawled all the way up to our fourth-floor windows and our cabinets, wardrobes and shelves were perpetually lined with newspaper on which mushrooms or some kind of medicinal plant or another was drying. My parents and maternal grandmother lived in anticipation of ‘seasons,’ those couple of weeks (or days) when certain variants of mushrooms, or elderberry, linden, nettle, chamomile climaxed. Those outings were our equivalent of Disney World trips, though it’s most probably only in retrospect that they feel that way. I doubt I did not resent being dragged out of bed at dawn, though the feeling, if ever there, did not record to memory.

These two poems –“Gentian” and “Still Life with Placenta and Cherry Tree”— were written soon after the birth of my son here, in the U.S. They came out of a deep sense of loss of intimacy with practices, all deeply embedded in the natural world, that incorporated birth and mothering into traditions that synched with the natural world. When breastfeeding nipples cracked like earth during extreme drought, I remembered the gentian blue solution that made my childhood’s mouth and throat sores bearable. One summer, as a pre-teen, I had gorged on cherries from a cemetery, against warnings that I would be possessed by the souls of the dead, and somehow the deepest fears of death dissolved. I mourned not having planted my placenta with the cherry tree; writing the poem brought a modicum of consolation, as only art can do.