you are not the memory of you I carry within you left her discreetly behind like a forgotten sweater on a chair after a visit for my impending days in a quiet room for you knew back then how clouds can gather how lost we can get how the absence of light can lead to the kind of rust that makes it hard to see hues of blue how you’ll be afraid that I might still be identical to my own memory the one you couldn’t avoid having buried inside so you might anew upon touching it become the living memory of you the one you could no longer recover for you could no longer remember the chair or the grace
Victor Pambuccian is a professor of mathematics at Arizona State University. His poetry translations from Romanian, French, and German have appeared in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, International Poetry Review, Pleiades, and Black Sun Lit. A bilingual anthology of Romanian avant-garde poetry, with his translations, for which he received a 2017 NEA Translation grant, was published in 2018 as Something is still present and isn’t, of what’s gone. He was the guest editor of the Fall 2011 issue of International Poetry Review. His poems have appeared in Communion, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Panoplyzine, Lucky Jefferson, O:JA&L, Poetica Review, Detour Ahead, The Elevation Review, and Pure Slush.