Monica Cure
Pitești
Let’s meet
at the McDonald’s by the clock
but the McDonald’s is gone
the clock’s gone too
*
Thảo Nguyễn’s song “Temple” and her account of her practice resonate with me. Her lyrics explore a parent’s past——what they remember and don’t want to remember.
Monica Cure is a Romanian-American poet, writer, and translator currently based in Bucharest. Her poems and translations have appeared in Boston Review, Plume, RHINO, Kenyon Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Asymptote. She is the winner of the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her translation of Liliana Corobca’s novel The Censor’s Notebook. “Pitești” is part of her first manuscript in progress, The Country of Leaving.