Abecedarian Picnic with Yiayiá X at Blood Falls
By Elisávet Makridis
Antarctica, an aftermath of snow & ancient seawater.
By Blood Falls, it’s not hard to imagine
Charon, angel of death, approaching on a gondola made of Anatolian bones.
Do you see him? Yiayiá X asks, snacking on a hazelnut
éclair in her frost-nipped coat. There, waving hello before rowing down the rusty
flow into Victoria Land. On our tongues,
glaciofluvial droplets condense in wispy bows. I stare down the
hole engineers bore into Taylor Glacier with a probe called
IceMole & catch the dead blowing kisses. They say soon we’ll move to Europa,
Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, should microbial studies of subsurface
kingdoms prove fruitful. If you
looked at a brine sample under a microscope,
Marinobacter bacteria resemble your ancestors’
naked legs. We watch generations cluster beneath
our heads, one into the other like
polycrystalline. From them you’ve inherited rows of
quicksilver teeth: your blood, a pointy
Rubik’s cube the dead fiddle with. Consider, you are the
spectral information in a sound vibrating off one woman to the next. Consider
the wound, like a whale, has a larynx for seeing. The eye of your
uvula is the eye of your mother’s uvula. Her mouth, a burning door with a grape for a knob.
Victresses of echo, in this field of snow,
we knock our voices on ice-hot
xyloid. Yiayiá, I want to carve a funeral with my throat, but best for now to
yell into the glacier hole. Watch my vowels snap off each
zeptosecond, as tiny as fifty microliters, the volume of a single drop of water.
Listen to “Abecedarian Picnic with Yiayiá X at Blood Falls” here
By Blood Falls, it’s not hard to imagine
Charon, angel of death, approaching on a gondola made of Anatolian bones.
Do you see him? Yiayiá X asks, snacking on a hazelnut
éclair in her frost-nipped coat. There, waving hello before rowing down the rusty
flow into Victoria Land. On our tongues,
glaciofluvial droplets condense in wispy bows. I stare down the
hole engineers bore into Taylor Glacier with a probe called
IceMole & catch the dead blowing kisses. They say soon we’ll move to Europa,
Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, should microbial studies of subsurface
kingdoms prove fruitful. If you
looked at a brine sample under a microscope,
Marinobacter bacteria resemble your ancestors’
naked legs. We watch generations cluster beneath
our heads, one into the other like
polycrystalline. From them you’ve inherited rows of
quicksilver teeth: your blood, a pointy
Rubik’s cube the dead fiddle with. Consider, you are the
spectral information in a sound vibrating off one woman to the next. Consider
the wound, like a whale, has a larynx for seeing. The eye of your
uvula is the eye of your mother’s uvula. Her mouth, a burning door with a grape for a knob.
Victresses of echo, in this field of snow,
we knock our voices on ice-hot
xyloid. Yiayiá, I want to carve a funeral with my throat, but best for now to
yell into the glacier hole. Watch my vowels snap off each
zeptosecond, as tiny as fifty microliters, the volume of a single drop of water.
Listen to “Abecedarian Picnic with Yiayiá X at Blood Falls” here
 | Elisávet Makridis (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominated poet-educator raised between Astoria, Queens and Greece. 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 poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Canthius, Indiana Review, Reed Magazine, Grist Journal, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University where she teaches as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English. |