Vasiliki Argyris

5 poems

Vasiliki Argyris is a writer, visual artist, and worker living in Philadelphia. She attempts to find the threads that bind history, poetry, and walking the earth. Her work has appeared in Voicemail Poems, Pamphilet, and Works & Days. She has a musical project with her partner called Etherea Meeting.

To Make a Movie

If all days have left you wanting,
like holding a candle to something and
other things you never do,
do not despair,
says my voice and not-my voice.
What they have done in the past,
in the fragment of less than the past,
in a still from a movie
depicting hands holding what you don’t,
is only the finest cloth,
horsehair under a crinoline.
Their days were much more ample, really
whether skirts full or slender, they are like you,
and they too are remembering

You know it is human to have hands that hold
such an object,
So your cheeks know to be wet for
what is lean in your life

A dream coupled,
what is another word for past,
that is not but a meager wound?
A dream coupled has a better chance,
time links to time
like arms strewn through elbows.
A dream on the chainlink of time
is a many-handed forthcoming.
What is another word for future
but a beloved weeping,
our precious injury?

The Nihilist

the weather channel hums
in the nail salon
a human footprint fossilizes
in the sidewalk
the bugatti in the window, sparkling
i punch the fashionable couple in the face
on the street
one face for the two of them
how much square footage for
my unbearable feelings?
there’s ire in the
dough
i’m not a nihilist,
that’s why i punched them

Miroloi Poem

Your daughter closest to the flute
Plays her airs
Heiress of your temper
Where does she sleep?

Folded in an Epirotic lull

After Heaving with a Flu-like illness, Good Posture

I woke with new eyes
The cough on the train did not frighten me
veils of cloud were fresh upon
This future
landscape of bits of
Earth, hardened
To glass and spire
Mirrors going up and up
Reflecting only sky and
Pigeon
Biting into a broken apple

a Wedding

a mediator was sent
to talk about the ceremony
your eyelids are riveting in
the morning
quarterly lull
in our lover’s quarrel

impotent morning
hyena memorabilia
i look and still see what i think i know
i lift the veil for a crimson mouth
i knew to be pale pink
altered under dusty taffeta