Our Country
Our house was a country my parents founded but none of us
were citizens. Nights, the corridor’s iron gate was a border,
locking us in our rooms. My mother was both state and warden.
I wrapped a hair around my diary before leaving for school,
each afternoon found it broken. Inside I wrote if you can read this
I hate you, and felt glee to see her eyes hold back the rage.
After my father bought a red Camaro and started his string
of work trips, my mother lay bare on the balcony to catch
the sun. Her pubic hair a briar patch startling the neighbours
and my brother’s friends in the grimy capital of our kitchen.
Indifferent as any god, my father
occasionally brought about a miracle, a new television
or a bag of sweets. Once I called him by his name
and he struck me to the floor. A Glock slung on his belt,
at mealtimes he lay the black hole of its barrel next to the calamari.
To divorce was to secede, forbidden territory.
I’m staying for you— for the children was their gospel.
The winter she thought dad had tapped the phone,
we laughed until I tuned into my mother’s call on my radio.
That night she took a knife to god, and we fled
into the dark, but the state later denied this ever happened.
Vasiliki Albedo‘s poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry and elsewhere. She won the Poetry Society’s 2022 stanza competition, was a finalist in Frontier’s Global Poetry Prize and her tiny chapbook Arcadia won Poetry International’s competition.