AMSTERDAM REVIEW
  • Home
    • Poetry
    • Translations
    • Fiction
    • Interviews
    • Essays
    • Photography
    • Fine Arts
  • Masthead
  • Issues
    • Us v. World Revisited
    • Spring 2025
    • Fall 2024
    • Spring 2024
    • Fall 2023
    • Spring 2023
    • Fall 2022
    • Summer 2022
    • Exilé Sans Frontières
  • AR Tunes
  • Submissions
  • Contact

Five 
​by Eleni Sikelianos

Real World Feeds

All you who feed
   on the food of earth
 
             frog 
   like a piece of dry leather creaking     in the field
                                                                          snapping up flies

             hunter
   licking the pot                                                            of tiger bone stew


             tire 
   a black tongue lapping
                                                                          a black cold road


Get this ghost mama off a me
                                                             What is it?

Looking for all the animals in their animal holes
                                                                         You
a citadel of real cellular transparency
tangling an uncertain analogy between a lynx’s and your own
                                                                folded, sleeping limbs

             your gams and
             pinions and fins    
                                                like the mind: a mild or wild
             snarl                                             of yarn 

Return all the soft-bodied animals
                                   to their homes: sea pansies, anemones
                        boars, bears
     even pet guinea pigs not distracted from being by
                                                                 footsteps across the floor

We find ourselves cool and clean and in
                                             the next hour

    you’re in the night-surf, a ragged white washcloth stuffed in the corpse-mouth
    ash-grey legs, wiry hairs nubbed down

                            what animal cadaver

do you carry
the air there

outside your window
is around

                          the tree

              I still

care for it, all

you                                 who

                                                                        light-fingered
                                                                                     night-fingered

feed

:

paradise
before we
killed or
breathed

the tangled bank

​slept synonyms 
through the night

shouted regret in
kitchens

suspended consciousness 
by which the body

stands, rests
and drops

darkness
into waters below

all your 
shuteye

will give you this

face in utter darkness, crying
with total dedication

wantonly, with abandon

laughing into
a feeling of depth

I was thinking
thoughts don’t think 
my change

and then, yet, yes

Once Water’s Heart — The hand The land

If you were a child 
standing on the grass holding an ice cube in your hand
   and your hand was warm, was warming
or if you were the earth holding an iceberg in your belly
             the bathing veins feeding the heart

And if the ice, the mountains were talking
             to the animals walking over them
The mountains and the clouds
encouraging them
             The foxes and The bears
or scolding them
             The rabbits and The deer

The hand, the land heating

Yes, I care about icebergs 
more than I care about you, she said                   No,
no, I don’t
care about icebergs
more than I care about you, she
said, I do
I do

The ice embroidering the animals
             stitching them in       hoof and 
                                                                    tuft
The animals embroidering the ice      step by        step
If the child held out her hand
and the wolves walked over it
The friction between paw and palm igniting

The one cooling the one heating the other

And if the child’s hand
Was too hot now
To hold anything

Crystalline heart melting in our hands

Flame could not destroy these mountains
because they were made outside the mind
and animals are etched there
also in the blood in your hand

The Promises of Air

and I who am cold
that
world-cold
of mechanical go(l)d when
words
because they are attached
to nothing, gratis, go
floating through air where 
live, yes, birds

warming the sound of that rhyming empire

pulling words out of the everyday world by snapping the neck of meter
for the road ahead
which will be air, for sure

             ≥


each word there
mad fair
delinked and flying



I heard the saw of feathers first, then
3 black forms whuffing
Picture
from the left, cuffing right

Crows, compass of their whuff and world,
sounded like a flock of small women
clearing their throats before diving into a pool
2 chasing the other, noisy
wings & cawing

So what was the crow story?
Two parents crazy to encourage a fledgling?
A thief? an interloper? why so pissed off?
A corvid ménage gone to the minus?
From the ground, no way to know
Here where the words lick the human forms with their dirt-driven skins

But there is the instant after the woman leaves the ground, before
her head hits the water

Poem by Eleni Sikelianos

First published in Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press, 2023). Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher. 
Eleni Sikelianos
Photo by Penelope Massouri
Born in California on Walt Whitman’s birthday, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and "a 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. Your Kingdom (Winter 2023) will be her tenth book of poetry, riding alongside two memoir-verse-image-novels.

<<  girl scout camp pastoral by Lip Manegio

Three by Daniel Carden Nemo  >>

​Home          Masthead          Submissions     

Contact​​           T&Cs
Picture
© 2025 Amsterdam Review. All rights reserved.
  • Home
    • Poetry
    • Translations
    • Fiction
    • Interviews
    • Essays
    • Photography
    • Fine Arts
  • Masthead
  • Issues
    • Us v. World Revisited
    • Spring 2025
    • Fall 2024
    • Spring 2024
    • Fall 2023
    • Spring 2023
    • Fall 2022
    • Summer 2022
    • Exilé Sans Frontières
  • AR Tunes
  • Submissions
  • Contact