All in by Romana Iorga

He Came Forth Like a New Beginning

SWWIM Every Day
by Romana Iorga

by Romana Iorga



‍ ‍After Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (III, 33)‍ ‍


He came forth like a new beginning.
A portent, a fevered dream, an ultimatum.
Even asleep I knew how momentous
it was, that confrontation of ours
between blossom and rot. You’ll say
it’s a lie, but in the years after,
the shoebox under my bed filled up
with blue, wet-bird letters from God.
He’d been sending them down
and across the borders of thought.
What could I possibly do?
I took them all in. The first one
burst open. I buried it in the sod
under clouds like blimp mailboxes
pouring rain. A river rushed
through my mouth: cold and green.
Each letter was written in cursive
sadness only. He told me how
there was so much promise in pain—
the one faithful thing certain
to make us less mean, or grant
what we wished for: to have been
happy, unhappy, insane or not,
to have been lonely, to have been.

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Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) and a woman made entirely of air (Dancing Girl Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in various journals, including New England Review, RHINO, and The Nation. She lives with her husband and children in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Minotaur

SWWIM Every Day
by Romana Iorga

by Romana Iorga

Somewhere on the outskirts of the body
the gulls are trying their wings
on gusts of wind.
Somewhere the foghorn announces danger
at low tide and billows break
over hidden rocks
the way sleep breaks
over the submerged cliffs
of consciousness.

I spill into the world all anew,
carried forth by the amniotic gush
of half-dreamed words.
No newborns are ugly,
though some of them turn out more handsome
than others.
But who’s to profess judgment,
when we all are sinking lead, bait
for what lurks beneath,
when the line
we hold in our hands
leads directly to the beast?

The morning is yielding
its foggy pastels to brighter
tempera.  Soon,
I will slip into familiar skin,
utter the names
of these almost forgotten
alleys of veins and arteries,
learn to inhabit again
the labyrinth of my body.

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Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga lives in Switzerland. She is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian, 'Poem of Arrival' and 'Simple Hearing.' Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Cagibi, Washington Square Review, PANK, and others, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.