Two Poems
Konstantinos Patrinos
Father as King Midas
Silence is golden
— Thomas Carlyle
Yes Thomas I know and I have a lot of it
Tons of high karat silence
Silence for dinner
Silence for breakfast
Not-for-bank money-exchangeable silence
Rejected-in-a-pawnshop silence Thief-ignored silence
Non-conductive silence More-like-hagiography-silence
but-not-suitable-for-communion chalices silence
Soft-and-malleable silence Family-worrying silence
Ascetic-in-a-desert-slowly-beginning-to-doubt-herself silence
Every Sunday I used to brush the rusty door hinges with walnut oil
Is that what you had in mind
The wind outside my window combs the cherry tree branches soft
like a mother’s hand The leaves are pointing at me pleading with me
Can we begin fluttering now?
Behind closed lips my swollen tongue drowns
in spit The cherry pits in my throat
are pushing to bloom
What shall I do?
Thomas?
Everything I’ve touched has turned into (silence)
The pigeon on the sill has turned into ( )
the tiny message tied to its leg ( ) The dust floating
around the house is glittering ( )
is the furniture now the walls my limbs
have become ( ) The ( ) is piling up
My offspring a dazzling ( ) the bones
of my ancestors all turned into ( ) by touch
Only my name’ s left and even that
begins to shimmer ( )
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The Only Grace I’ve Ever Known
is mere metaphor.
Grace is invisible mouth, is ball of bees
in my throat: whenever I speak
my neck swells purple and honey. Grace is me
sneezing in public squares to get a few
god-bless-yous from strangers.
One day my grandmother picked
the lice off my thick black hair, one by one, crushing them
between her thumbnails. God created lice for us
to kill, she said, meaning, who isn’t useful
isn’t fit for mercy. Woken up next morning
on my damp pillow stained yellow with night sweat,
I made my bed first thing.
Once, a white pigeon
crashed into her window, plummeted
four stories down. She said, this is God’s Spirit descending
in the wrong century. She watched it rot instead of
burying it.
On TV a smaller animal went
limp in the fangs of a bigger animal. Paralyzed
in awe of Your creation, of the maggots slithering on top of
polished marble stones.
Konstantinos Patrinos is a Greek-German writer living in Berlin. His work has appeared in RHINO, Indianapolis Review, Hunger Mountain Review, and others. He works as a high school teacher for political science and philosophy