Eligibility Post 2023

Hello! Happy New Year!

I hope this year finds all of you healthy and well. I’m sitting with a cup of cold coffee in a non-wintery and spring-y Greece – it’s 19°C degrees currently— contemplating the passage of time. I think time is one of those concepts that are indescribable when it comes to how everyone experiences them. Some days feel like months. Sometimes, full years feel like a brief moment. A blink of the eye and they’re gone. And there’s also this alternate dimension that we’ve all fallen into where 2020 was last year. Well.

All this to say, that I was very lucky to publish some pieces last year, both short stories and poems. I have no idea when this happened, how I’m starting from this very same chair another spin around the sun all over again, but I’m grateful and I’m ready.

 

Here are the two short stories I published last year in two wonderful venues:

  • Money Thirst” in Radon Journal. A contract gone wrong, as all things do when you make deals with corporations.
  • “The Bodytakers” in Heartlines Spec. A story about huge tortoises with forests on their carapace, found family and taking a leap of faith.

 

And here are all the poems that are eligible for the Rhysling Award:

 

 

 

how to poem

I found this in one of my notebooks. I like to practice writing with my left hand and I will do it sometimes when my carpal tunnel acts up.

 

*on the photo reads

 

Where is the poem
in the words written with
your non-dominant hand?

Maybe it’s in all the wrong
spaces. Or maybe it’s in the
learning to write again.

 

A leafless tree against the blue sky

Rhysling Eligibility Post

I’m very late to the party, but since the nominations for the poetry Rhyslings awards end tomorrow, here are my eligible poems:

“Worlds Apart” appeared in Star*Line.

“First rule of time travel”, about losing yourself in wormholes, in Star*Line.

“Petrichor”, on the fragmentation of the self and the distributed consciousness in Utopia Science Fiction.

“Helianthus”, an anarchist poem about changing the meaning of work, in Solarpunk Magazine.

“An ode to the stone cold gaze”, about Medusa, in Daughter of Sarpedon: Tempered Tales, from Brigids Gate.

If you haven’t voted yet, it would mean the world to me if you considered my poems.

Almost poetry: a sea poem

Thalassa, the daughter of Hmera

her depths unexplored

her secrets unconquered

she has conquered the world

explored our inner depths

we ‘re all Thalassa’s daughters

 

definitions from Greek to English

θάλασσα, thalassa: sea

ημέρα, hmera:  day

A poetry anthology dedicated to Ursula K. Le Guin

I am lucky enough to have two of my poems be part of a wonderful poetry anthology dedicated to Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s called Climbing Lightly through Forests: A Poetry Anthology Honoring Ursula K. Le Guin and includes poems and essays inspired by Le Guin’s work from great artists all around the world. Working with the editors Lisa M. Bradley and R.B. Lemberg was a great experience.

The first poem “We dream the future in our songs” has been inspired by my favourite book of hers “The Word for World is Forest” and the second one “Time is being and being time” is an answer to her poem “Hymn to Time”

While I didn’t discover Le Guin as an author until a decade ago, her words have created a little nest in my heart I visit frequently and add to it as I read more of her work – which I do slowly, as I’m afraid of the emptiness once I won’t have another book of hers to open, like a last step on staircase that doesn’t really exist.

I believe this book covers this emptiness, approaches her work with love and care and all the ways her words have touched her readers.

 

Time is being and being

time, it is all one thing,

the shining, the seeing,

the dark abounding.

 

from Hymn to Time, by Ursula K. Le Guin