sexless half-objects
slow, deliberate movements
the absence of ‘a’ trembling
as intentional as yesterday’s arthouse movie
two hands in refusal of ‘a’ quivering
they open an unlocked door in-slow-motion
as calculating as ‘a’ yesterday
i’m exiting
stepping as slow as i can
into ‘an’ outside that’s also ‘an’ inside
deeper into ‘this’ hazy ‘be-sides,’
the apparition of a small family
of adorable but sexless half-objects
waves at me
my hands refuse all waving
yet i wave i wave & i wave.
Athens’ bleating bleakness
When Athens’ bleak bleakness’ bleak
comes bleating & bugging you at night,
Don’t bleach her black’s bleaking blow
(b)right away
Blue & barren
as her bleeding being
might make you blight,
enjoy Aegean seas’ bitchy blurring
of your blinded mind astray.
an ungreek sky
pale
cerebral
constipated
finally, withered away, sun-splashed nympho-summer, you
your hysterical blue-white exuberance has always been such a drag
satisfied & relieved your turquoise has been put to sleep
at last, i say:
bring in december-aegean’s dark-gray agony,
for it’s near Lyngbakr‘s ‘s frozen green-black waters
that i’d never refuse to drown.
Frank O’Hara’s pas de quoi
Her face: a weeping galaxy of sparkling scars. They’re dancing
Frank O’Hara’s cha-cha-cha. Both world city and comet,
she reeks of rural urbanity orbiting French theory. Please pronounce
the “r” Irish style. So typical-elliptical of her. She drives non-linear
cars without number plates on unkept Californian freeways
(orbiting two different tax planets?).
Breathing isn’t her business. Urbanity is, for at least 56,8 %.
The rest resembles a blizzard of birds and plastic glossology
or λαλιά. 43,2 % devours shrieking sounds, turns them into
syntactical nothingness. Look up: she’s orbiting again.
More boom-boom-boom, please, and less of blah-blah-blah.
She’s all cha-cha-cha. Typical-elliptical of her face: a drawing of weeping
scars orbiting Frank O’Hara’s ha-ha-ha. French theory?
Mais pas de quoi …
Exorcism
Some friends said, “go full abstract.”
I tried again today, yet after a while,
as usual, the contours of a tormented
female torso appeared on my canvas.
A woman’s body stuffed and tortured
by objects looking like tubes and wires.
A Frankensteined corpse sprouting limbs
as if filled with a decomposing lexicon.
Fernando Pessoa believed that words
can magically acquire physical form.
Imagine a word moving into an organ.
Like a permanent burglar, it sets up shop
in, let’s say, your liver, bowels, or lungs.
Or see language as a gigantic sonic ant colony,
with ant-words zigzagging under your skin.
This, I feel tempted to believe, could be
the true meaning of cathartic exorcism:
The casting out of alien vocabulary.
If only I could perform it on myself.
Initially trained in clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Giorgia Pavlidou is an American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. Besides her clinical training, she also received an MA in Anthropology from Leuven University, Belgium, an MA in Urdu Literature from Lucknow University, India, and an MFA from Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Caesura, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Clockwise Cat, Ocotillo Review, Honidi, Trilobite, Ubu, Philosophical Egg, Moon & Sun Magazine, Entropy and PoetryBay. Trainwreck Press launched her chapbook ‘inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel’ in 2021, and Anvil Tongue Books her full-length book of poems and paintings, ‘Haunted by the Living – Fed by the Dead’ in May 2022. She developed an attraction to Surrealism early on via her psychoanalytic training and practice. Her meetings with Dr. Naiyer Masud in India and Will Alexander in Los Angeles boosted her interest.
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