Green Horses on the Walls

Cristina A. Bejan is a spoken word poet who performs her poetry across the United States and Romania under the stage name "Lady Godiva." Venues include: Busboys and Poets (DC), Pure Lounge (DC), Spit Dat (DC), City Soul Café at Noir Lounge (Raleigh, NC), Carol 53 (Bucharest), Tattered Cover (Denver, CO) and Mercury Café (Denver, CO). Many of these poems were part of the one-woman show entitled Lady Godiva (performed by Muslima Musawwir and directed by Star Johnson), which appeared at Source Theatre as part of the Mead Theatre Lab Program in February 2016. This is her first collection of poems that she has developed over the past ten years. She writes about her Romanian heritage, the inherited trauma of communism, love, mental health and sexual assault. The poems capture Bejan's tortured love affair with the country her father escaped in 1969: Romania. Like so many exiles and migrants around the world, there is a compulsion to return and to leave the homeland. "I don't think it will ever stop," Bejan writes. Romania suffered a brutal communist dictatorship for forty years, and these poems reveal the horrors and the inherited trauma that are products of such historical injustice. She also tackles the sensitive topics of mental health and sexual assault and with this collection hopes to fight the pervasive stigma surrounding both issues. And finally this is a book about love: family love, love of ancestors, mindless youthful mistakes, the realities of American dating, forbidden love, and finally true equal miraculous love. The collection includes 28 original poems by Bejan and two translations by Bejan of poems by iconic Romanian poets Ana Blandiana and Nina Cassian. Green Horses on the Walls has been endorsed by titanic literary voices of the Romanian diaspora in the United States: Andrei Codrescu, Saviana Stanescu, Domnica Radulescu and Lucia Cherciu, as well as Finishing Line Press poet Suzanne Richardson. Bejan's collection is written mostly in English, with Romanian making important appearances. The book's cover is a photo of Bejan's great-uncle Aurelian Ene and grandparents Marioara and Anghel Bejan strolling through Cișmigiu Park in Bucharest, Romania, circa 1936. Bejan wishes to thank Jess D. Mekeel for the inspiration and Camelia Crăciun for editorial help. Green Horses on the Walls is dedicated to Alina Bejan.