“The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.”
Once they are buried under dirt, people become place. Flesh becomes earth, geography. They become enmapped, acquire fixed coordinates. That afternoon, she would be going to see her father, that patch of soil to the left of the cemetery entrance, third row. A momentary spasm took hold of her left eye. She slapped it shut.
By now I think you understand,
I’m an emotional melody unsung
How can I express in words the overwhelming expanse of the absence of feeling that I find myself in.
There’s a place
In the woods
Where the dead come alive
And the living melt into the foliage.
I have to pee. but I can’t be bothered to get up at the moment—besides it’s not like I can’t hold it in for a few minutes more—the sensation is still at that phase where it is not sure of itself and can be easily ignored. . .
Why write? he thought.
There’s enough ink on paper, already.
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. This anonymous, yet famous statement, popularized by linguist Max Weinreich, emphasizes the arbitrariness of the distinction between languages and dialects, drawing our attention towards the political processes behind the decision to codify a particular vernacular into formal language, while condemning other linguistic variants into the subcategory of either the dialect, or the idiom.
How can a word simultaneously hold within it innumerable worlds and something as intimate as a single touch, many years ago? A sense of self and calm, several waking nightmares ago.
Ήταν μια που τζιείνες τες μέρες, τες παράξενες τζιαι τες δύσκολες. Χάνεις ακόμα τζιαι τον ρυθμό του χρόνου.
Να μου φέρνεις θύμισες
ριζωμένες σε χώμα,
να στοιχίζω τους αθθώνες
στο περβάζι μου,
να ποτίζω, να κλαδέφκω,
ν’ αθθυμούμαι πάντα
Anna’s toes dug into the earth of the dead zone, her ankles trespassing into the no man’s land snaking across the island from east to west. Her breasts, that lay safely within government-controlled territory, were cushioned by the gentle slopes of dry weeds collapsing onto the torrid landscape.
Απέναντι από την κεντρική εκκλησία (το χωριό είχε άλλες δύο), του Μαρ Γεωργίου, είναι η ταβέρνα Γιάννης. Είχε 34 βαθμούς Κελσίου και στις δύο μεριές της χώρας. Αυτή, βέβαια, είναι η τρίτη. Υπάρχουν στο νησί δύο τουλάχιστον πατρίδες, κι ανάμεσά τους, αναποφάσιστος, ο Λίβανος. Βάλε και το ίδιο το νησί μέσα, την πραγματική πατρίδα, λέω στον Γιάννη (όχι τον ταβερνιάρη, τον φίλο που μαζί ταξιδεύαμε), γίνονται τέσσερις.
Η αγκαλιά εν ευκολη για σε;
Η αγκαλιά, θέλει θκυο σώματα μαζί.
Η αγκαλιά εν μοίρασμα, τζαι φυλακή.
Η αγκαλιά, εννεν εύκολη για με.
Της άρεσε εκείνη η ψύχρα του πρωινού που έκανε τα καλοκαίρια στο χωριό. Είχε χίλιους λόγους να μην το επισκέπτεται, αλλά η ψύχρα εκείνη, ειδικά όταν ξυπνούσε πριν απ’ όλους, ήταν σαν να έφερνε το χωριό στα μέτρα της.
They say that time heals, but in the case of Varoshia, time is the destroyer of all memory. Does that leave space for the new? Like in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is the destiny of any place to just return to dust? But can memory reconcile with the dust? Or is memory just the dust of time?
Στην πόλην μου φυσά ο Σ̆ιρόκκος,
βραστός τζ̆αι ξερός.
Συχνά-πυκνά κουβαλά μαζίν του αμμοθύελλες που την
Σαχάραν τζ̆αι την Μέσην Ανατολήν.
Αλλά το τηλέφωνο μας εννά σταματήσει να χτυπά; Εγώ νομίζω οτι κάποιος εννά μας ψάχνει τζι’εμάς. Για να μοιραστεί τζιαι τζείνος την απελπισία τζιαι την απόλυτη πλήξη του να ζεις ακόμα,
πολλά μετά την τελευταία μέρα της ζωής σου.
I’m afraid of everything, even my own nakedness.
That’s the secret.
I shrink away from mirrors lest I see how much space I am able to consume.
Time flows, wild and untamed like a river. It sweeps people off their feet, dragging them along its path, merciless and free, spreading them apart through cliffs and streams. Those who survive, stand the test of time. Those who survive, live to call the rest history.
As the world closed in, the sunflowers bloomed.
Norwegian Wood is about travelling. It is about first love and unrequited love. It is about loving one’s self, and especially about loving life. It is about redemption, never giving up, and about being able to let go. It is one of those stories that echo through infinity and remind us that the power of written word can lift us up even when we are feeling sad or depressed.
“Επιλογή σου άθθρωπε τη γη να τη μοιράζεις αντίς να σπέρνεις τη χαρά, το μίσος να στοιβάζεις.” Κάμεις την οικόπεδα…
“The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.”
― Ernst Bloch
The thing about the body is that it is an archive
and the thing about trauma is that it drills
an active volcano into the chest.
‘to exit the factory and save our thoughts, the only gear we control.’
We are here to change gender normative narratives and challenge them. As a team, we want to tackle this issue starting with the core mechanisms of education and awareness. As a group of young people sensitized on the issue who have a great understanding of this situation and passion for a change, we decided to act.
Now guess I’m a country hating man, for hate is the last Christian supper I’ll ever understand, and how my people can spell kindness with their red right gun arm, oh there’s a bullet coming for the sun, watching my man bleed unarmed, watch my gay siblings sing ‘till dawn
“Put down the map, white man;
let me show you what you’ve done.
Take out your camera,
but first let me ask,
what have you enjoyed the most? The defensive walls? They look harmonic on the map. Ignore the middle, that’s a scar, the last divided capital, just look at the Venetian shards.
She finds the galloping clock
Funny and I couldn’t
For the life of me
Laugh at something
So strikingly serious
I threw up words on my plate words which are not mine
I slice them deep into their core
Just to see if I can recognize something
Besides, she knew that curiosity and crossings can kill the cat.
‘The day had arrived. Once again, a day like all the others. History was having coffee as it prepared to repeat itself. This time I was to be patient.”
Ο,τι δεν ζω, την νύχτα αναπόφευκτα αναπολώ.
By the hammers
There will be a fusion
we cannot understand ourselves as real
confused if we should come out, confused if we are the outcome, come out of what, the outcome of what, the outcome of coming out or coming out of the outcome of coming out
This place of pure pain. This place of pure contradiction. This place of pure fiction. This place where nothing is pure.
Πως αντιδρούσαν οι άνθρωποι του πνεύματος στο καθεστώς του Λάγκερ, σε σχέση με τους υπόλοιπους; Σε ποιο βαθμό η πνευματική καλλιέργειά τους, η μόρφωση και η τέχνη μπορούσαν να αποτελέσουν καταφύγιο; Εν τέλει, ποια ήταν η αντίδραση του διανοούμενου μέσα σε συνθήκες απόλυτης εξαθλίωσης;
words anyway have the tendency of making everything real, they chain a moment by placing it at the mercy of specificity-highlighting all the what-ifs & the surely-is.
If you want to find the truth
You’ll have to lose some things first
against the aggravating heat that is determined to flatten all activity
‘Poetry can be a wholly creative process. It has the potential of creating worlds that can be nothing other than the product of the poet’s imagination. Photography, instead, is a transformative process. It can only deal with real things. As such it is often confused with reality itself. But, then, it has an enormous transformative potential. Both, though, are fascinating forms of story-telling which is, after all, the cornerstone of human civilisation.’
in the grass that cracks open concrete
and in the seeds that never found soil
but found sea
Circling in golden crops on the outskirts like an extraterrestrial trying to compete with the foot long centipede flexing its segmented back through the undergrowth wondering where all its lush humid playground has gone off to
For many of us, summer is a synonym to more time for ourselves. The temperature rises and with it, our desire to do something just for our own personal development or mere enjoyment. One of the most common activities that people tend to jump(or fall ungracefully back) into during vacations is catching up with reading books.
‘…the earth cannot become a shelter unless it is unfolded, or disclosed, by human appropriation.’
Now she’s flying to Africa.
I was watching her from afar –
the deeper she waded into the lake
the more she looked like them.
During the quarantine, meeting friends, going to bars, clubs or to the gym, teaching in an actual classroom and all that constituted my past life had vanished. I was left with a virtual classroom, virtual relationships and walking or running in the afternoons. It was then that I started really noticing the strangeness of the sky.
imperishable testaments to
perishable promises
As cliché as the title may sound, I tend to place a lot of emphasis on book covers. A book cover has the power to create a positive or negative presentiment about a book even before I start flipping its pages. Through that first visual encounter, book covers can act as trustworthy predictors of our potential enjoyment or hatred of a book.
The mother dies. Or maybe she kills herself. Or maybe she is killed. The father locks the two-year-old child in a room. Covers up the windows. The father believes that the child, deprived of language, will begin to speak the language of God.
This unreal country 