Julia Lee, “03” from A Dream of Jade series
“(Salinity also plays a role in the density gradient: Saltier water will sink
beneath fresher water.) Because of this gradient, the mucus will sink until it starts
to float; then it lingers.”
—Sarah Zhang from “A Slimy Calamity Is Creeping Across The Sea” published in The Atlantic (June 2021)
“I waited an eternity to hear a loving word.”
—Marion from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987)
At the family altar
burgundy carnations drop their necks like just-
caught fish. My gaze on a vase’s arrowed abdomen. In our
dialect we say Τρώγω την ψήσ,’ I eat your soul, meaning to love one to
evisceration. I think of the Greek
folktale wherein a nun vixen attempts to lure a pigeon, rooster, & skylark into her
gorgeous guts. Makes each winged thing confess to sins till its outwittingly devoured. Matrilineal
hunger is a black worm living off the
intelligence of water, red algae, snow-packed grains of dust. Drunk on icy
juices, a slim segmented body not unlike your body: skin-split, exilic,
kernels of cells the shade of kryolith. In June the Sea of Marmara becomes a
lamentation of snot where flakes gum into stringy organs. You lay a palm on a swath of
mucilage, twist fibrous gunk round to sculpt
night snake neckerchief nasturtium. Each shape born of hunger, seafloor-risen, feasting
on feces, sugar, hot windlessness. The mucus hardens as though a scab in
pelagic sun, so tough seagulls fuck on it, & I wish so much to ask what sunk then lingered of your
quadrillionth want. Yiayiá, my blood bounces off your blood, light up a
retroreflective tunnel. In the folktale’s variant, a hunter shoots the nun vixen & birds fly out her
stomach. We plot resurrection: mold slain vixen into Marion, chicken-feathered angel in
trapeze traffic. Beneath her, every never-heard loving word, algae blooms in
untreated sewage: beloved, earth to my coffin, heat through my
Vagus nerve. In this dirty sea, everything you touch flowers, starves, dies, returns. Yes,
whatever’s left undone buried its symptomatology in me,
xenolith in host rock. Yiayiá on the trapeze hangs on a swing of snot like an upside-down chicken.
You no longer have to wade an eternity. Hear me, a woman un-
zipping herself from calamity. Zenithal, like a fat ant kissing your scalp.
Elisávet Makridis (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize- and Best New Poets-nominated poet-educator raised between Astoria, New York, and Greece. She is an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College where she received the Andrea Klein Willison Poetry Prize and Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry. In 2022, she was the winner of Ruminate Magazine’s Poetry Prize judged by Rajiv Mohabir and Inverted Syntax’s Sublingua Prize for Poetry, second place winner of Canthius’s Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry judged by Liz Howard, as well as a finalist for Indiana Review’s 1/2K Prize for Poetry, Reed Magazine’s Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, and The Sewanee Review’s fifth annual Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction Contest. Her work is published or forthcoming in Canthius, Indiana Review, Reed Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Grist, Frontier Poetry, among others. She holds an MFA from Cornell University where she teaches as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English. Her Twitter is @elisahvet!