Visiting the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin

I just want to tell you that I understand you,
sir, stunned as you are under this dome
which is like the inside of an eye. You
know there is a lining on which the eyeball sits
those floating things you can swim out
to, like those, or like a glass ornament
if it was balanced
on a collarbone.
You’ve come to know she’s there
before you’ve come to know she’s there
the bust of the Egyptian Queen
and her flameproof little apartment
telling you she knows about the cocaine
and the orange snow and how the brain
parachutes a fantasy to the ground like
a hot parcel.

A mining boat slurps
diamonds out of the sea floor and this
woman wears it through her tongue.
A fox with a wilted cabbage in its mouth
knows that you know she moves like
a glass ornament pushed
by the air down a black field and
her missing eye:
the mineral imperceptible in
this black field. You never really
valued the moment, never
strove to fill it with something.
You really think if she had two
collarbones she wouldn’t
fill them with rainwater
and gold rings and spiders
and powdered drugs in tiny boxes?
The boat funnels moths
into its abdomen and
I see her spider veins
the fox in her brain the black
cabbage turned glass in this freezing
night and you, sir, are in a dome
of your own silence.

I CANNOT USE THE WORD MOON

in this poem out of
respect for the phase
I am going through. I’ve
always wanted a New
England summer with
the weeds and the man
who is by no means
extraordinary grilling
bland burgers on the bbq.

The humidity would be
sufficient and I would
be formidable because I eat
lobsters and think the stupid
corgi is adorable and
use this man for his boat
or his body or his
stainless steel pan.

I am happy in this scenario
a sea snake, languid and liquid
and predatory in a tub of
glitter and water, and because
this man considers grilling burgers
a quiet act of heroism he doesn’t
notice my red beak,
my open brain,
the gold sheath of a March fly
shedding in the wind.

This is the empire of corn,
of buoys out in the bloody sea.
The only man I truly
ever loved is in someone else’s
sheets kicking sand off the bed
and the electricity pole

outside this someone else’s
window is our sole means
of communication. The sky wears
the sun like a red medallion and
I am truly and significantly alone
and all of this is ruined because
I see the moon
the moon
the moon
the moon
the moon
the moon
the moon
wearing the dark like a sock.

Hello, this is a sonnet

about what fog really is, tiny liquid droplets hanging in the air, the same air which hangs your thought like a crystal where you left it but it’s also about an invention I’ve been thinking about lately, an inverted furnace of sorts, so that heat and fear goes in and a cool draft of whatever the opposite of fear is comes out. Before technology inherited fireworks, a crystal, red from the floors of caves, was used to give explosions their whiteness. There is no better way to describe forgiveness other than like this. Only when you ask it to combust will it appear in the blackness of a meadow, carbon after carbon in a disco. But it’s the asking that’s terrifying and as I write you this sonnet I am missing you more than I have ever been able to miss something before and those men out there pressing spikes into the network of ice, they own me, they’re not climbing away from the brain they’re climbing towards it. I hang a thought for you on a droplet in the air like a jewel hooked through an ear. A fly trap made of blown glass dangles from the ceiling and I think of the craftsman who built an iridescent tomb. Nothing burns once out of its cave and in the sky heading for the ground, the fly in its glass cave, the disco of droplets, this invention which is the sonnet which is asking you for forgiveness.

Anatomy of a small river system

The wagon is cold and I am late for
therapy and a stag running on blue
snow slow enough to catch a plum
in its mouth yet precisely up to speed
with my window, could have been there.
I carve a windpipe through the stillness
of the wagon and find a breather there
a couple rows ahead. I’ve never swam
in a lake I pretend to tell him. You must
have considered about the fact that collarbones
are fucking strange. If you stand in the rain
still enough you could fill them up with
rainwater: a miniature lake for a teen wasp.
Water pockets of algae would eventually grow
and dilate and dazzle and
a swan,
a red dragon,
plastic, peas, a boat, a bat,
a yacht, an obsidian duck.
Obsidian essentially only occurs because
of speed. Lava cools so fast crystals don’t
have time grow but imagine living with
the knowledge you could have been a crystal.
A group of black birds meet and open a lattice
against the bruised sky and I decide I want to
talk about my mom in today’s session. What
really is the difference between a volta and a
valley. I’ve only just realized in Greek we
use the word volta to suggest a walk.
Is there a shipping fee for this thought
red like the duck,
the beetle smoked by high noon,
the mom wasp looking for her teenagers.

I AM TRYING TO WRITE A POEM ABOUT WALES

but when you grow up on an island
where the crickets and the brain can know
green glitter pools only if they’ve dreamed them
and the A/C is a prerequisite for sex,
you cannot expect greatness from me.

We met in September when the economy
was doing well, when the coriander plant
caught enough rain to give to its kids.
I understand the appeal. Of green,
of wetness, of a river cutting through your

kitchen. Maybe it’s an island thing, keeping
lovers in reserve. Listen, there’s heat in
this belly, I’ve accepted the fact that I’ll
never write poems about snow, that I’ll find
your garden too dewy, that the hot side of my brain

is red like the side of a mother koi fish.
The news today reported the weather outside
is as if all the heat has gathered into a tiny tent.
Our water banks are empty. The coriander plant
is so green. I like that you like it. I want the

river kitchen, I do, and this thought,
passing me like a canoe, keeps
picturing desire as a mosh pit.
And in this mosh pit I will add:
a sugar cane plant, glitter, a skimpy dress

for when I’m in the mood, a tent,
a cricket leg,
a fan, a guidebook for Wales,
crickets, crickets
crickets, crickets like fog in the brain.

Penelope Ioannou is a poet and writer and recent graduate from Oxford where she served as Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Review of Books. She writes about the uncertainty of what comes next and occasionally about art, books, and films she didn’t like. Her passion is Shakespeare, spaghetti, and islands.