Club Hydra
Vasiliki Albedo‘s poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, Magma, The Rialto, and elsewhere. She won the 2023 Hammond House International Literary Prize and the Poetry Society’s 2022 Stanza competition.
Ariadne
You will discover me
inside a maze of my own making;
a dream world, seeming real,
that obeys no logic, makes no sense.
I blunder from closed loops to
dead ends, unable to escape
yet barely knowing I am lost.
Others have attempted
to release me, but always found
the maze impenetrable,
its paths too densely intertwined.
Wary of monsters, they
avoided the dark corners, afraid
my prison might soon be theirs.
You are not the same. You have
the faith that somewhere within
these contorted corridors
there is someone worth rescuing.
You have the courage to come in
and the ball of thread
that will lead us out of here.
Tim Taylor lives in Meltham, West Yorkshire. His poems have appeared in various magazines, webzines and anthologies. Tim has published two short poetry collections: Sea Without a Shore and LifeTimes, both with Maytree Press.
Blog: https://timwordsblog.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/timtaylornovels/
Metamorphosis
Yellow means you’ve nearly gone.
I study you in bright sun
as buttercups bloom in parched grass.
I forget what trauma led to you –
your kind appear often on female flesh,
unexpected, provoking curiosity.
What did my body not get right?
What drunkenness or violence passed?
They say I would have remembered if I’d been hit –
watched the red flush bear witness
to broken capillaries, a flood of fresh blood,
the rush of iron and oxygen,
felt less pain when you looked your worst –
purple and black as blood cells and iron
broke down,
the unglamorous green of biliverdin
and finally, as skin heals – bilirubin
which sounds more red than yellow.
Dear bruise, I prefer you to a tattoo
to see what shape you’ll take –
butterfly, bee, small sun, daisy centre, or maybe
a lemon, decorated by blue vines, squeezing out
the last pigment, leaving a fresh canvas
to court the creativity of careless gods.
Lisa Kelly‘s second collection, The House of the Interpreter (Carcanet), is a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation 2023. Her first collection, A Map Towards Fluency (Carcanet), was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021.
Blood Moon
There is a myth that it never rains in Greece but here we are. Eleni and I are sipping ouzo in the café, sitting under the tree that gives us some protection from the big drops that smack down on us. We’re cold though it’s July. We’re staring at the Aegean Sea. We are in the café that will burn down three years from now when the fires spread across northern Evia, randomly selecting several homes to destroy in this town, Rovies, and many others. There will be pictures of residents escaping by sea, on ferries, and I will spot Vasilis in one of them. He is taller than most Greeks, thinner than most middle-aged Greek men, and I will find out later that he fled without taking his money, all he had, which he had hidden, under his mattress; this sounds almost unbelievable but after the financial crisis no one trusts banks. I didn’t ask why he left his money behind – he, like the others, thought someone would save them. That is a myth too, of a savior. Neighbors with garden hoses were the only help that came.
It is raining and Vasilis, who owns this café on the sea, asks us if we’re doing okay. He speaks only Greek. I speak very little Greek. And Eleni speaks a Greek that allows her simultaneously to get by and amuse her audience; she lives full-time in Athens now, having moved from Ohio, and she barks out verbs without conjugating them, words without changing them to plural or singular, you can’t tell if you’re in the past, present or future with her so you listen carefully to orient yourself in space and time. There is a lot of misunderstanding but also a lot of hilarity as we talk to Vassilis because unlike the Cretans, who take their language and culture seriously, people on this island are easygoing, they laugh at many things. Except politics, which they will discuss endlessly in a tone that seems like a fight even though they are agreeing with each other. Earlier tonight, Vasilis was sitting with some men at the entrance to the bar, his bloated friend was petting one of the café’s kittens, a tiny orange and white boy who I will learn is named Nacho, the thick fingers stroking the cat while he shouts about the newly elected prime minister. The cat will later settle behind me for warmth; only a few months old, he’s not used to unseasonably cold weather either.
Vasilis comes over in his hot pink raincoat and tells us about the forest, that will also burn, where he forages for greens, and the pearls under the rocks in the sea which you can eat, they are so delicious. Eleni and I look at each other. Clearly, we’re getting something wrong, you can’t eat pearls. What’s that word he keeps repeating? He is pointing at me, telling Eleni he thinks I’m so pretty. He is asking her where I’m from. He asks about my name. “She’s Jewish,” Eleni says. He looks puzzled, like a dog that’s heard a strange piercing sound. “You know, um…like the holocaust?” Why she says that I don’t know, but two ouzos in and Eleni and I start howling with laughter. We can’t stop. It’s like a clown skit, everything he asks her about me, she answers in a way he cannot understand and then the three of us start laughing because for Vasilis, a misunderstanding with a woman is flirtation. He tries to kiss me, I say no, Eleni asks if she should leave. “No, stay” I say. Vasilis tells us about the red moon, I can understand this, κόκκινο φεγγάρι, he wants us to stay until it appears in the sky. He brings us another ouzo, Eleni and I light another cigarette, and we stare up until a full red orb appears above us, brilliant, glowing as if pulsating, on the sea that will one day save Vasilis but I never find out what happened to Nacho.
Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at a college and in jails in the US. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Bending Genres, BULL, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Emerge Literary, Hippocampus, Jewish Lit, MER, Peatsmoke and Tiny Molecules, among others.