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The Home Is Six Hens Which Never Lay Eggs by Alina Stefanescu

March 9, 2022
Reading Time: 1 Minutes

The home is those animals
who eat and keep trying. Two parents,
a little sister, the trusted friendship
of crimson azaleas. The hearth

is your native tongue, heating
the porch. The horas who rise after
sunset, the fire-dances competing
with 100-foot magnolias for stature,

for standing above to look
downwards. And the children
count sheep inside the concussion
of solid pink bricks. The house

bent, the house suave as plums
who hit the ground before ripening.
The home is those useless seeds
your mom snuck over an ocean

from Romania: one single tall plum,
the single survivor. The tree refused
to give fruit if left on a lawn, alone. The baby
shipped to grow through the drumbeat

of lawnmowers. The heart is the brick
of porch floor, the absent family, the dead
voices, gossiping between paper envelopes,
abandoned near unopened doors.

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Poetry  / The Weekly

Stefanescu, Alina
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

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