Story of a Sieve

by Melina Papadopoul​os

i.

the most rebellious thing
I've ever done
was swim against the current,
upstream

the crayfish were angry
still

they gave me
fisherman forgiveness.

---

ii.

I also apologized to them
for catching them in the palm
of my hands and watching them
slip through the cracks of my fingers.

I told them that
I felt like a puppeteer
who works the strings best
when they are untied,

I felt like a child
who takes a sieve
and shovel to the beach
just to build a sandcastle
and start dynasties of hermit crabs,
currency in sand dollars

but still walk away
empty-handed.

---

iii.

actually, I've always
found my own two hands
to make a better sieve
than anything else.

they could separate glass from sand,
water from glass and sometimes

water from water

---

iv.

the truth is
I'm just too apologetic
to want to do any wrong.

I spend too much time
separating good from bad
with my own two hands.

when good is the glass
and bad is the sand--

bleeding ring finger

Knowing Virginia Woolf's Eyes

by Melina Papadopoul​os

Virginia's eyes have horse sadness in them,
a mare's wet vision that blurs everything
into a concave illusion. The distance has vertigo.
If she stares off for too long,
she might trip the landscape on a cataract.
Maybe it's a step up from crying.

Somewhere on the iris,
houseflies go into orbit.
They threaten to make
their razor blade noises
in the ears or eyes of something not yet dead,
if they can make it there
before Virginia locks her lashes
for the night.
They know that they see too much at once;
they have no corners in their eyes
for distorting shadows. They're all
treated with the same farewell buzz.

Virginia is still learning
how to look into the distance
without turning her back, her head.
when she's alone with a noise,
she tells herself to listen
for the same thing:
the galloping of her blood, veins cantering.
Virginia knows that Earth moves fast.
It moves so fast that the only way
to slow it down is to trip it,
rabbit trap it in words.
It'd save the nameless a whole lot
of suffering. When they cry out,
they'd have something more to shout
than God, God, God…
that man's mind is ringing
and now he believes he's got
his own thunderheads in his ears.

Virginia's eyes have horse sadness
in them. When she catches reveries
of stallions in them, she remembers
what to look for in loneliness.
She could cry them away, she could
soften her gaze into a lament,
but she doesn't want to blur this landscape any more
than it already has been.

Fly wings in her eyes.
nothing is a step up from blindness.

Recipe

by Melina Papadopoul​os

Sometimes, I want to ask you
if my name still tastes like something.
it's taken every last drop
of summer's sunlight stamina
for me to finally feel like a picnic.
I've just begun to dot my I's
with watermelon seeds.
I could be an ant farm if my blood cells
give out and decide that oxygen is too heavy
to carry to another breath I'll take for granted.
I don't have a Mount Zion in me.
I can't make internal pilgrimages worth it.
perhaps one day, my brain
will decide that it was trivial to carry
a name outside of childhood where you could
have called me that kid or something
and I would have been just as lost in my own skin,
even if someone replaced my heart with a compass
and my feet with a map that knows the way
without my reading so deeply into its travel lines.

So refresh my memory.
Put a familiar taste on my tongue,
a foreign one even.
Is my name still something
that you don't even chew before swallowing?
Don't worry, I don't want to melt in your mouth.
I am afraid of melting because
it could be the only death that doesn't come equipped
with an afterlife.

Is it too much of a hassle to still call me sweet?

I that know cavities are a burden.
I know that dental drills scold before forgiving.
Eventually, you hear your mother's voice
in that spinning snarl. Eventually,
you remember that your mouth is wide open
and that you're wide awake.
you begin
to think of names that you can't assign to nouns,
just adjectives and so I'll just come right out
and say it,

is my name still beautiful?
Could it be the real name
of a real wildflower?
If not, that's okay, I want
to be a scientific name.
I want to flavor soup
in Latin and, if I must,
with my death-cap tendencies,
I want to put out a dinner party
Linnaeus style.

But sometimes, I want to do more
than ask you. I want to tell you
to close your eyes and open your mouth,
and I want to place this name of mine
on the taste bud with the best memory
I think you'd forget me
if I let you keep your eyes open.