reflection on Alina Ştefănescu’s ‘My Heresies’ (Sarabande Books 2025)

My Heresies
Alina Ştefănescu
Sarabande Books, 2025

Silence is a museum we enter speaking. Time is the time machine. Touch is the root that deceives the radar’s caress. This verse, grimheld. Grimheld, this verse. The decolonized vandalism of this verse. Verse as it de-translates its own final music in the pro-climactic body of Alina Ştefănescu’s My Heresies. Oh star, imagine a flare that discovers rescue. Oh humanly spun cobweb, hum dreamily our ear to betray some cocooned child orphaned of its silkworm petulance vibing while saying kill the rabbit before it makes the hole. The child, joking, of course. But we get serious. This is serious. I don’t like my death. The single question it asks is not sufficiently profane. I cannot in front of my children wear the clothes my dreamform shrinks. All sadness can be traced to surviving the inquiry. I was beheld in an egg by a bacteria enamored of cradling the belly button’s extra summoned eye. I don’t know how to learn. Curiosity, stage IV. I lose the coordinates of my surgery. An eel barters with yearning in the stomach of darkness. God is a coin dropped by time. That’s how long this lasts. By this I mean the not yet attempted circle indebted to the attended forwardness harnessed here in the fleeting searchedness of Ştefănescu’s double vision. I did at one time read books but they did not bell me to check my notifications. There’s a lot of salt in me. I don’t see myself. What I am saying isn’t important. Isn’t heard. Ştefănescu’s mirror is a thing peopled with a loneliness that impregnates everyone twice. I didn’t say much here. Leave this place where I said it. My Heresies is ongoing. Go.

~

reflection by Barton Smock