Elegy [The Summer I Learned to Swim]
Our neighbor’s daughter drowned.
She walked into a dream that shouldn’t.
Now and again, she’d shown
a hidden genius for Silence, like a swan
That had just descended into
the Atlantic with close-shut lids. In some
Bleached aisle of heaven, the wordless
open sesame of the body is a cupped hand
To the wind. Its loss surely felt
in the gull-world. But what’s to be made of
The body’s fragmentation in the water,
one half spilling red-hot, the other tearing
At its sleeves? She would be the type
to say half of death is the coming of snow
To the trilliums, or in place of laughter
there came a moment God, like the wind,
Dispersed very dirty bunches of flowers
in my life— whoever thought these words
Enough to have stamped them in their
blood, softly and very quietly like a shadow
Reminded of Time, as the long flute
of petals split and blew away? There is
An ancient bell looped around the question,
the way water pours into the mouth but doesn’t
Echo, the hole you steady your hand into.
What I comprehended, needs no comprehension.
The blue throat of the child is still
the throat of the child, tethered to this earth.
She walked into a dream that shouldn’t.
Now and again, she’d shown
a hidden genius for Silence, like a swan
That had just descended into
the Atlantic with close-shut lids. In some
Bleached aisle of heaven, the wordless
open sesame of the body is a cupped hand
To the wind. Its loss surely felt
in the gull-world. But what’s to be made of
The body’s fragmentation in the water,
one half spilling red-hot, the other tearing
At its sleeves? She would be the type
to say half of death is the coming of snow
To the trilliums, or in place of laughter
there came a moment God, like the wind,
Dispersed very dirty bunches of flowers
in my life— whoever thought these words
Enough to have stamped them in their
blood, softly and very quietly like a shadow
Reminded of Time, as the long flute
of petals split and blew away? There is
An ancient bell looped around the question,
the way water pours into the mouth but doesn’t
Echo, the hole you steady your hand into.
What I comprehended, needs no comprehension.
The blue throat of the child is still
the throat of the child, tethered to this earth.
1. Since you published with Crab Creek Review, how has your work grown or changed? What excites you now that maybe didn't back then?
Since being published, I've had the privilege of taking a course at Cornell titled Trauma & Invention as a second-year MFA candidate in poetry, co-taught by Professor Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and Dr. Cathy Caruth, that radically rewired my writing and poetics.
In light of that exposure, I find myself more interested in and thinking about process over product; in how I might write to counter-spell, to disrupt, to move fugitively across tears inherited and enfleshed. I’m interested in the fugitive opacity of the wound in relation to the transgenerational trauma of my Pontic Greek refugee ancestors, and what it looks and sounds like to carve address anew out of a vertiginous site/sight that splits from itself.
Coupled with the above, I find myself most recently excited--or, more accurately, haunted--by Saidiya Hartman’s reconceptualization of mourning as "a practice of countermemory that attends to that which has been negated and repressed” in her brilliant essay, “The Time of Slavery” (2002, 771), and what it would entail and mean to hew poetic coordinates out of that countering as it relates to my own familial history.
2. Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
Write to transmit, not to prove. Poems are improvised prophecies in the making. Failure is an opening into the future: listen to it.
3. What are you reading?
Lately, I find myself rereading as a practice of revisited encounters with what lies in excess between the gestures of a text. Over the last few weeks, some books that are indefinitely stacked beside me include: Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Adélia Prado’s The Mystical Rose, Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Alphabets of Sand, Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space, Sandra Lim’s The Wilderness, and Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead & Resurrected.
4. What are you working on?
Currently, I am channeling my energies into writing a manuscript to be submitted towards the completion of my MFA--a pending collection of poems.
Elisávet Makridis is a Pushcart Prize- and Best New Poets-nominated poet raised between Queens, New York and Greece. Currently a second-year candidate in poetry and graduate instructor at Cornell’s MFA program, she is working on an in-progress manuscript and teaching first year writing seminars in hybrid literature to undergraduates through the English Department. Apart from Crab Creek, her work has been published in Grist, Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, The Poetry Annals, and The Hunger.