Assistant Editor Lisa Low: In Alina Stefanescu’s “Why One Cloud Is Kin to Not Liking,” a deft observation of a cloud’s “power of chilling” follows a list of reasons why the speaker’s in-laws don’t like her: “I am a vampire sucking the blood of born-here / americans,” she says of their viewpoint. As the poem progresses—looping in the speaker’s son who tells the cloud to go away—a phrase ascribed to both the speaker and her son, “loud & talkative & elitist,” becomes an endearing repetition, and cloud-reading begins, however imperfectly, to make sense of the cultural and class conflict between families.
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, 2020). Her poetry collection, dor, won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize and is forthcoming in July 2021. Alina’s writing can be found (or is forthcoming) in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for Pidgeonholes, poetry editor for Random Sample Review, poetry reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and codirector of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. More online at alinastefanescuwriter.com.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
