by Elena Lelia Radulescu
Interior With Tulips
A breeze finds the door to the study room ajar and flows in. On a corner
table, in a vase, a bouquet of tulips laments its indoor predicament. One
tulip remembers the garden, and sheds a petal like a small yellow boat
onto the Persian rug. The breeze spots a woman reading a book by the
window, drifts near, and leans over her shoulder. In the book, a woman
with a small valise arrives in a town by the sea. She walks along a narrow
street to the cathedral, a garland of stone angels above the entrance. At the
threshold she stops as if to pray, but she doesn’t; she turns around and
crosses the piazza to a café with the white and blue awnings. Lost in
thought, the reading woman lets the book settle in her lap. Perhaps she
recognizes the town depicted in the novel, recalls the cobble-stoned streets
and the harbor seen from the top steps to the baroque cathedral. Perhaps
she has been in the same café, sat at the same table, sunhat on a chair, a
pattern of dark and bright stripes cast by the sunlight by her feet. The
breeze wants to know more about the young woman with the valise
arriving in the town by the sea, but the reader doesn’t pick up her book.
The breeze loses patience and leaves. Another tulip bows its head over the
vase’s rim and a petal descends an invisible stair.
At the Flower Market
Touch a blooming peony,
big as an infant head
and you’re back in Rimnic,
a barefoot child,
hidden in a peony bush
next to the glass verandah
in Great-Aunt Nora’s garden.
Sticky ants on your feet,
scratchy leaves in your face,
you wait for the clinks and clanks
of cups against a tray, prelude
to jasmine tea, to end.
Eyes closed, the milky smell
of peonies—a tingle in your nose,
you listen for the stories told
in voce piena by lonely women
at the lavender hour of old age,
to learn:
who died of a broken heart,
who by a Russian bullet,
why cousin Marta killed herself
two days before her wedding,
how Uncle Stefan, at a poker game,
lost his father’s apple orchard,
then wore the heavy clothes
of poverty and shame.
Now, you gaze at plastic buckets
filled with white peonies
and pause
as if a voice might rise
from feathery corollas
to whisper secrets in your ear.
Elena Lelia Radulescu is a Romanian-American writer. Her work has appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review, CALYX, The Cape Rock Review, Third Wednesday Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Blue Earth Review, Evening Street Journal, The Equinox Journal, The Alchemy Spoon, and other literary publications. Her first poetry chapbook will be released in 2027. She is a retired teacher and lives in New Mexico.
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