The following poem by Cristina A. Bejan is part of her award-winning poetry volume “Green Horses on the Walls” (Finishing Line Press, 2020). If you haven’t had the chance to follow Cristina’s work, we highly recommend reading her other contributions to ARCHER blog, or her amazing poetry!
America World Police, Inside Empty
A US Military base on the banks of the Black Sea
A bus leaves full of men and women in fatigues
Going to the Eastern European capital for a day of museums …. i.e. “Fun”
Headphones blaring hip-hop
After this Sunday
From Mihail Kogalniceanu -MK – being shipped to death
Romania is the gateway to Iraq and Afghanistan
It’s death upon death
This same day back home in middle America
News of the soldier’s high school best friend
Shot
On the streets of Youngstown
About the author: Cristina A. Bejan
Cristina A. Bejan is an award-winning Romanian-American historian, theatre artist and spoken word poet living and creating in Denver, Colorado. She grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and received her BA in Philosophy (Honors) from Northwestern University, where she also studied theatre. An Oxford DPhil and a recipient of the (Rhodes) Scholarship and a Fulbright, she has held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown University, and the (Woodrow Wilson) Center, and has taught history at Georgetown and Duke Universities, among others. She currently teaches history at Metropolitan State University of Denver where she was selected as a Finalist for the 2021 Faculty Senate Teaching Award. A playwright, Bejan has written nineteen plays, many of which have been produced in the United States, Romania, the United Kingdom and Vanuatu. She writes creatively in five languages and has been published internationally in every genre she writes in: academic, theatrical, and poetry. She is founding executive director of the arts and culture collective Bucharest Inside the Beltway. Under the stage name “Lady Godiva,” she performs her poetry across the United States and Romania. She has written Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Green Horses on the Walls (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and is also a contributing author for The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Vol. 3 (University of Indiana, 2018). She has appeared on C-SPAN, and her work has been featured in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, American Prospect, Evenimentul Zilei and Observator Cultural. Bejan is on the Board of Directors for Immigrant Research Forum (Washington DC) and ARCHER (the American Romanian Coalition for Human and Equal Rights, Chicago), and the Advisory Board of Alianța (Washington DC). She is an advocate for NAMI and RAINN and volunteers for Colorado's Romanian philanthropy organization RAFA (the Romanian-American Freedom Alliance). Bejan also serves as cultural editor for Hora in America magazine. She is a proud member of the Colorado Authors League, the International Center for Women Playwrights, and the Dramatists Guild of America.