Mihaela Moscaliuc
Ode to the Cacao
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
This poem emerged from my obsession with dark chocolate, that is to say, with the cacao bean. I have been making my own chocolate for a few years now, and I revere each bean. My morning ritual involves savoring a piece (or two or three) of handmade chocolate, inviting the terroir to awaken my senses and ready me for the day. I have been trying to learn as much as possible not only about the bean-to-bar process, but also about the place of cacao in our history—starting with its sacred function in Mesoamerican cosmologies—and in pleasure narratives, in our ecology and global economy.
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the collections Heartmoor, Cemetery Ink, Immigrant Model, and Father Dirt, translator of Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper and Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star, editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern, and co-editor of Fruits of the Earth: Harvest Poems and Border Lines: Poems of Migration. She is a 2025 Guggenheim fellow and recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright. Moscaliuc directs the MA program in English at Monmouth University. mmoscaliuc.com