for Doinita and Mihnea

In Brussels, the locals are kind and help
with food and shelter, just as they did
a generation ago with those
fleeing war and the Nazis.

Official after official asks
about interrogations and threats.
I have to explain wire-tapped phones, 
body searches, censored letters,
a home where I am the enemy.

I try to fit the festering past
onto the two inches of white space
allotted on questionnaires,
write my life, tell what would happen
if I were to be sent back, as if 
white paper could depict the damp dark
cells I would have to share with hunger,
beatings, and the rats waiting for me
in the land of my stories. They tell me 

I’m free now, and no one here understands why 
I can’t stop watching my back at all times, why
I still fear that the hostile government
I’m trying to escape looks over my shoulder, 
snatches my thoughts, takes notes, maps 
my mind—the only space I have to keep myself
alive.
                        

	for Serban and Alin

We’re nearly there, my love.
In a few hours all that we know
of the world will become
an eerie country. Behind us
the Iron Curtain, ahead—
a land where no one expects us.

Inside my womb a wing-like beat;
our child makes known his presence.
There is no angry sea to part,
no Bethlehem waiting
in the dark, no stable, no magi,
no guiding star. We are a man,
a woman, and an unborn child
in search of something intangible,
of freedom.

Our son will never understand
how terror could be hidden
in common things, he’ll never
be afraid to think, to speak
his mind, he’ll never know
grandparents and traditions.

His myth starts now, with our flight.