Syngrou Avenue, 1930
To George Theotokas, who discovered it
When the smile that breathes beside you defeats you, tries to bow
and doesn’t consent
when the vertigo that remains from your travels among books
detaches from your mind to the pepper trees on the left
or the right
when you leave the petrified ship traveling toward the
seafloor with broken rigging
the archway with its golden décor
the columns with their meaning that narrows them
when you leave the deliberately carved bodies
for measuring and amassing riches
the soul that doesn’t match your own soul, no matter
what you do,
the toll you pay
that little feminine face in the cradle gleaming in the sun
when you let your heart and your thought become one
with the blackish river that stretches, stiffens and goes away:
Brake the thread of Ariande and voila!
The light-blue body of the mermaid.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096TTS37J

Long Listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

https://griffinpoetryprize.com/press/2023-longlist-announcement/

Then the great silence took control
and the sun started going down
amid the fiery sky in the west.
And the sky turned red. And the soil red like blood.
Nothing was heard on the whole earth.
And dark phalanxes started appearing
slowly-slowly coming down the slopes.
The war dead started appearing
from all the plains, the gorges, the mountains,
the roads.
They unfolded into black long lines as if
they were going to battle
and they proceeded dragging along their feet
and they staggered with their bodies leaning forward
as if they had walked for a long time
as if they felt tired of waiting for so long
and they marched and limped and they stirred slowly
at the far end of the world.
The earth quaked every so often then it cracked open
and a black-green hand poked out of the soil
and stretched its rotten fingers.
The dead stirred and stood up
and they stepped on the other dead and walked
and they dragged themselves on the earth
and grabbing onto the army coats of the others
they rose and joined the phalanxes making
millions of walking dead.
The horizons turned fiery red as if the world was on fire.
Dead men were coming from the trenches,
from subterranean stoas, holes,
they were coming from the mass graves dug in
the plains
where they buried them in haste as if they were shoveling
a pile of manure.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763564

Loose Ends
All night long, sleepless,
you promised not to cry
to drive downtown
to the family lawyer
and tie up loose ends
suddenly, you sense his presence
so intensely in the car
on the driver’s seat
he used to call his kingdom
you feel as if sitting on top of him
his erection deep inside you
like when you saddled him
back then, in the secluded
Horseshoe Bay Park road and
you pull the car to the shoulder
rapid heartbeat overtakes you
a sweet elation runs through
your spine down to your torso
conspicuously moving
forward and backward

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763750