Two Poems

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Horse Power, or: There Are No Things More Beautiful Than Lewis Hamilton

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Yes I understand the world; it doesn’t mean I want
to do it. It’s hard! There is a cloud that hovers above me, and only me,
and my Tarot spread comes out DEATH DEATH DEATH like a fruit
machine. Belovéd, I sink my teeth into the sofa regularly.
The TV I like – its honest-to-god solidity, its corners that never ask
anything of me. So I’m forgetting my wishes, all day
I submit & submit like a submissive horse. Fuck it.
I wish I were a fast man, golden boy, the fastest.
Zoom zoom. Imagine trusting yourself with your life.
Despair levels: usual. Expectations: low to basic.
Modicum of desire: found, seeing behind Lewis Hamilton’s
beautiful, fastest ear with the dangly cross a tattoo that reads B
beautiful, fastest ear with the dangly cross a tattoo that reads L
beautiful, fastest ear with the dangly cross a tattoo that reads E
beautiful, fastest ear with the dangly cross a tattoo that reads S
beautiful, fastest ear with the dangly cross a tattoo that reads S
beautiful, fastest ear with the dangly cross a tattoo that reads E
beautiful, fastest ear with the dangly cross a tattoo that reads D but
the point is beyond the point, and the dark wind picks up again.
Fear: always. What of faith in the world, in my continuous
existence in it? What if I believed the world wanted me back?
All night I dream about large animals in heat, trampling
a purple bed of hydrangeas, eating and winning a lot.

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Laid Out

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In the second dream after it happened, I am all laid out
on a table, at the end of a long, crisp corridor.
Various body-organs
have been labelled with toothpick flags, like canapés.
Some of the labels say ‘Miruna’, but most of them
say ‘Nothing’. Among these,
my left eye, my spleen, unborn babies
with a talent for languages, yellow fat.
The dream is for protection or resistance, as if gloved.

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Miruna Fulgeanu is a Romanian-born poet and translator based in London. Her work has appeared in Poetry London, The Yale Review, The Rialto, Berlin Lit and Basket among others. She is the winner of the 2023 Oxford Poetry Prize and the 2024 Patricia Eschen Prize for Poetry, as well as a member of the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective 2024-25. She’s currently working on her first poetry collection.

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