Veroniki Dalakoura and The Woman’s Book of Bone

Crushed I speak to you from the besieged city.
—Veroniki Dalakoura

And so, it was the time of poison flowers,
the time of man’s dominion over Earth.
Snowberries in the mouth of every woman.

A bit of lightning, say, in their nostrils.
And so, the world spun orbits in the age
of the tree bark’s bend. The rough edges curled

with aching. Saturn turning round and round inside
each ring of yearly growth. Or despair.
And so, Veroniki Dalakoura was aware of the earth’s pull,

the phallic pulse. So much is left inside our leaving,
she carved into the bark of the tree’s heart,
where a lover’s name should be. She stepped from here

to there, the world going on simply being the world.
The woods beckoned her voice. Canebrake
swaying. Wood mice on her tongue. Bits of excrement

in her hair. Genesis is genocide, she once proclaimed.
Here, take this rib from my side and create
a new world. There it was before us—a glowing bone.

Held high like a hammer. And she thrust it into the sky,
holding it fast in her fist. Genesis is genocide,
she repeated. Book One of The Book of Agony

and Death. Let’s begin, again, with a reading
from The Woman’s Book of Bone. And the leaves
of the cypresses parted, as if there was a great breathing

among the trees. And the canebrake swayed in unison with her
name, Veroniki’s name. Breaking itself into a broken
flowering that fell into the fierce river in which she stood.

Byron Leondaris Listens Over and Over to Beethoven’s The Ruins of Athens and Fears the Future

There was a bowler hat
dead on the sidewalk,
ants stiffening the brim.

He had combed his hair
over and over that morning
with Brylcreem his cousin
had sent from California.

If James Dean were alive,
he thought, I could finally be happy,
finding my own Ursula Andress
or Geraldine Page.

If you don’t see a reptile
in the mirror flicking its tongue
back at you, count yourself lucky.
If your teeth are intact.
If your saliva doesn’t spill.

Once, walking to the pharmacy
and contemplating the sadness
in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid,
he stepped into a pile of dog shit
and was convinced he was collapsing
ever more deeply into himself.

At home, in his tiny apartment,
he played an LP of Beethoven’s
The Ruins of Athens into the dark.
Where were his parents now
that they’d left the body?
His older brother, Pericles?
And what happened to every thought
they’d ever had? If the priest was right,
heaven for most was far away,
and the world itself was doomed.

Which is when he felt the rings
of Saturn combing through his voice,
his poems beginning to sound
like the Milky Way shivering
over the cold stones of the Acropolis.
Which is when the noise
of the world was too much.
And like Beethoven, he was convinced
he’d one day lose his hearing—
there among the ruins
of words—in order to swim
the deeper depths, starlight
sinning in the deaf man’s ear.

Katerina Gogou Laments the Junta, Telling Tales of the Tired Tongue

Yeah, I’m telling you, Niko, no one’s safe.
—Katerina Gogou

Not even the wood mice in your ear.
Or bits of rain not yet frozen
in snow. Not even our names stolen from us

at birth by overzealous parents calling us
this or that. Nor the days of the week,
the calendars of months, turning like crazed clock hands

until we give up, exhausted on a Sunday—in February,
say, or March—from so many hours, so many
chimes revolving our mouths. I have been telling you time

and again to cleanse our ears. Wash them out
with coffee and cream. Yeah, even coat the tongue
with milk against the jalapeno burn of too many false words.

Let’s say the ache of our lives was not here to stay
but only passed over our lamb’s blood
words smeared on doorposts so the slaughtering

might stop. I have been telling you again and again
about the junta, that the Colonels in epaulets
are pouting at the heavenly gates. I have spoken

into the milk-twitch of sorrow that the milk vetch bush
near the cypresses can no longer nourish us.
I have even told you, Niko, that none of us are safe.

Not Niko, Demetrios, or Giorgos. Katerina, Kiki, or
Chrysoula. That we are all born with a name
only to be replaced at the moment of birth seemingly by love

but with the utterances of others. Here, hold my tongue.
Strip their pins. Cut their mustaches. Tell the world
that none of us need bend back the breaking, nor agonize

the ache. That the men with epaulets are so small their medals
and ribbons weigh them down, grinding them even
further into a life of despair—that we are all forced to share.