National Poetry Month: Eleni Sikelianos

bryht mouth

we wanted to be perfect in our sounds
         so our mouths and the gods’ agreed    in our cars
we found foilage on our tongues
driving cocodrilos and crocodiles to market
found milk instead of miracles
ax and ask
rose/ruse
unclear nuclear
worn war
bridd and hros went bird went horse
wnt wether
now h/ow they flew
beortly
bryhtly
they glloped awy

***

Author photograph courtesy of Eleni Sikelianos

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Born into a family of bohemians, poets, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Her tenth book of poetry, Your Kingdom came out in 2023. Those ten volumes are in company with two amemoir-verse-image-novels. More info at: https://www.elenisikelianos.com. Insta: @elenisikelianos

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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