May’s Poetry Issues is out, including “Platamon” by Alexandra Mouratidou.
Along with The Hague and Malmö, I am pleased to announce that a small number of copies of the current and previous issues are distributed to a selected audience for the first time in Berlin, thanks to the publishing professional and co-founder of Litdocs and the Literary Field Kaleidoscope, Dr. Sandra van Lente, and in Liverpool, thanks to the curator and visual artist Jenny Porter, some of whose work you can admire here.
And if you can’t get your hands on a copy, you can still enjoy the content of Poetry Issues #3 right here:
The end of our affairs
We’d like to fold them up in a neat
bedsheet-in-drawer manner
but they’re a roomful
of hopelessly knotted yarn.
So we set them on fire in the yard.
We resume our conversations
with ashes-on-mantel earnesty
then stuff them in shoe boxes
at the back of the garage.
So we get to keep the advantage.
In cardboard urns we align the has-beens
the would-be husbands we never miss
but then we judge it inefficient
as it all comes down to mass.
So we finally throw them in the trash.
Unfastened
I asked him to tell me once again
about the death of stars.
He went up and down the room
and I stayed focused on his arms
that broke into a dance against
the stubbornness of time,
tracing harmony and flow
back to when
each loose moment had the stamp
of the movement of the sun.
Platamon
by Alexandra Mouratidou
The evening leans
the sea shies behind a fan:
geranium red.
A Child’s Solace
A memory of
forever invincible
young parents laughing.
Mirror Image
It took me years of staring
at a flat map
before I saw
the night’s stereogram
as firefly lights descended their strings
one by one
and surfaced to the unlit soul
of the one staring.
Interrogation Triolet
The empty pages forced me to confess
to all the murders that I didn’t do.
The pen is now resting on my chest.
The empty pages forced me to confess
insisting that we made some progress
before the late-night shift was due.
The empty pages forced me to confess
to all the murders that I didn’t do.
The second issue is out, featuring the Greek poet Alexandra Mouratidou, who lives and creates in Malmö, Sweden. Again, if you can't get your hands on a printed copy of the pamphlet, either in The Hague or in Malmö, you can still enjoy its content here:
Panorama
Oh, I get the Flemish masters, now. Why
it’s always three quarters rampant sky or
a biblical sea crashing ships filled to
the gills with apples from China. I get
the art-nouveau postures of disfigured
trees reaching towards the promise of a
future sold through foolproof far-fetched words like
bioscoop and magnetron, and regal
swans chasing seagulls in rainy cobbled
streets – a mental note of life’s absurdity –
the rulers of the waterways losing
feathers like pillows dusted with long rods
letting off shrills carried through loud, defunct
chimneys. This is the place I’ll learn to miss.
Intentions
by Alexandra Mouratidou
I’m scared of secrecy, silence, and sighs
the muted thoughts, the faceless sounds
and what does the unuttered hide.
Do words die out with time like past’s incense?
Soon, “I love you” will become a shroud you wear,
forgetting when or how.
Dad died. But since the years have passed
it’s like the phrase has died.
Words die.
Just like a fallen star, an embryo, that hope,
the tears that have gone dry, the years behind –
Words wear banalities mostly when they’re cold.
Sometimes, they’re bored and tend to lie.
Words fly. At times, they choose to abandon all
their fateful sense.
The rebellious ones diverge:
They fall from poetry’s cliff revived.
Adolescence in Small Town
They were coming back from the church:
None of them believed in much of anything
but it was Good Friday. From around the corner
there ringed the laugh of the easy girls,
a silver bell calling paupers to charity supper.
Eager, the boys turned their untempered backs
on the spring wind, to light hand-rolled cigarettes
bought for a copper and a half each
by some older brother. They were fixing
their baby rockabilly quiffs,
ready to make an entrance and if there needed be
a scene, when a father’s bobbing belly came panting
and chased them down the road
thrusting insults mixed with warm spit.
The poor bastards ran like demons on that holy night.
Morbid Sensitivity
The crippling effect
of human interaction:
I take it all in.
I’m like sunglasses
with no filter to reflect
those carcinogens.
No good can ever
come from a self-image clung
on passer-by frowns.
Dear Contemporary Art Gallery
You are unequivocally clinical,
with blinding whites and cold spotlights,
and your wine is lukewarm and papery dry.
Your Django Reinhardt live nights
are of conservatorial principle
and your well-ironed guests will kindly abide
by smoking only outside. But art is a log cabin
in the thick dark woods, not a sterile science lab
for measuring and tagging pure consumer goods
– and it’s known for being moody and quite cynical.
So, Poetry Issues is out into the world! Nothing competes with paper but at least, if you can’t get your hands on a printed copy, you can still read the content of the first issue:
Job Search in Athens
Dreams die choked by job listings
soaked in strong communication and
numerical skills, overwhelmed by
excellent multitasking, tangled in
risk management drills.
Notably unadaptable
and lacking in combed manners
dreams cannot develop
concise and comprehensible content.
Completely uninformed on proper
social and business etiquette
and not client-oriented at all, dreams
die with near-native English
for a competitive thousand
to thirteen hundred monthly gross.
Black Cat, White Dog
Improbable friendships flourish
on freshly mowed backyard lawns.
Stencil flower fabrics host nightly
cuteness contests for a place
close to the lady’s painted toes.
We chase butterflies together
lick each other’s furs under the sun
in a mutually profitable agreement
valid for as long as you
keep your paws off my food.
Love
They say we are Millennials.
That’s how they flatter
us, the Big Pharma Generation
of Seroquel and Ambien
Ritalin and Risperdal.
Where there’s a need there’s
a way, and now you can even
tame that crude, primeval kick:
Try Adderall – They say it does
miracles for lack of concentration.
Refugee Haiku
Now trending: The trade
of man-made pain washed upon
a picture-blue shore.
Repressed Tanka
Drunken you order
a Sex on the Beach and text
your ex to let her
know your blind date is coming
oh yes, she’s cum-cum-cumming.
Landscape
when the sun
sets
a soft breeze
gives
the face of the earth
goosebumps