A Holiday but What Holiday
Mom is waiting for you to return
So what if she already went to your funeral
Waiting for you while watching over us
waiting for the day she won’t have to wait any longer
Lights, rings, liquor, little chocolates, my sister and me—
now and then she rummages through drawers,
opens cupboards, light switches, little bottles, our skulls
to see if we’ve been burned, caught mold, fever, rust or worms
She counts us, switches us around, gets disappointed
Things were nicer before, she mumbles
puts us back the way we were, by alphabetical order, height, year of birth
each time of course we don’t fit like before
She tries us on her middle finger, her ears, palate, backbone, throat
then returns us to the boxes, side by side, there in the dark—
so much darkness inside me
that I keep forgetting, am I a little chocolate, a wristband, or a child
made of platinum or praline,
and when, more or less, will I expire
Suffixes Cover the Wounds
You said they’ll get bigger so I didn’t ask again
I believed that one day I’d stop being all scrunched up
that one day the syllables will stretch out, become more gaping
All my innards got tiny, my limbs shriveled up
little eyes, little hands, little hugs, little kisses to mommy. How boring
I learned just how far to go when pledging with force I measure the earth
I easily calculated length times width times not too tall
I said to myself they can’t not grow any bigger
like the young of some fluffy animal
So I waited for them
to grow into something, by a centimeter, a gram, a liter, decibel, foot or degree
into something obnoxious at least
To move with a longer shadow, make a ruckus, to become so immeasurable
I won’t have to count anymore
You never told me not to wait for the diminutives
In My Family House
The vultures gathered on the balcony
are sharpening their beaks and claws against the railing
Hey, careful, you’ll get all rusty, who can we fear
if something happens to you?
They’re waiting for us to come out to devour us
They want your liver, my carotids, our optic nerves and clitorises
They don’t know we won’t do them that favor
that we can endure locked up in here
eating one another
Translator’s Note:
What immediately attracted me to the poems in Niki Chalkiadaki’s little cannibals—three of which appear in this issue of ANMLY—was the child’s voice, its originality and depth. The poems that voice articulates throughout that slender volume offer a unique perspective for modern Greek letters, and in their range and complexity, strike a stance that feels brazen even for contemporary poetry in general. So much is called into question by the seemingly—yet obviously not—innocent speaker, as the oxymoronic title suggests. A young girl struggling to figure out why and how she’s supposedly female, where her father is, why her mother won’t allow any male presence in the house (so much so that even male kittens would get eaten), why she gets everything wrong at school, why even the language she’s supposed to be learning there forces her into binary choices she can’t relate to. Why even kids’ songs and fairy tales traumatize her and threaten the small sense of self she’s managed to come up with. There were numerous challenges in unraveling the young-girl Greek of little cannibals and re-weaving it into reader-friendly English. One such challenge was the frequent references to children’s playground songs, the Greek elementary education system and Greek Orthodox rituals. But by far the most difficult was the young speaker’s reliance on and rebellion against modern Greek grammar and syntax, which she feels keeps forcing her into something she’s not, even as it—in the way she uses it—enables her to navigate the trauma, dismay and wonder of the world she finds herself in. All of which suggests that Iittle cannibals is first and foremost about survival.
With family roots from Crete, Niki Chalkiadaki was born in Trikala and studied Greek literature and linguistics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She completed a Master’s in creative writing at the University of Western Macedonia in Florina and is currently working on a second Master’s in performing arts. In 2013, her debut collection on my back with fever (Mandragoras, 2012) won the best first book award at the National Symposium of Patra and was short-listed for the Greek National Award for Poetry. Her third collection little cannibals (Mandragoras, 2022)—which includes the poems translated here—explores “a tender, terrifying, animalistic space where boundaries between real and imaginary are blurred.”
Don Schofield lives in Thessaloniki, Greece. His most recent poetry collections are In Lands Imagination Favors (Dos Madres Press, 2014) and The Flow of Wonder (Kelsay Books, 2018). He is a recipient of, among other awards, the 2005 Allen Ginsberg Award (US) and the 2010 John D. Criticos Prize (UK). His poems and translations have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Greek National Translation Award. His memoir, From the Cyclops Cave, is just out from Open Books Press. don-schofield.com.