by Anastasios Mihalopoulos
– After Carolyn Forche
These are your myths organized pristinely
here in the glass halls of your half-finished life.
Each collected like an animal,
caged for your viewing pleasure.
Your myth of myths.
Myths loosened by the same story told
too many times. Myths released from the tongue
of a man who would later have it removed.
The myth he’d tell when he could only write it down.
The myth of inversion.
Myth where he doesn’t make it home.
Myth where he does but it’s too late
Myth where he realizes
home is not where he thought. He turns the ship around.
Myths made out of light from a lighthouse
Myth that doesn’t quite make it through the fog
Myths the lighthouse keepers keep
in the marrow of their bones at the bottom of the ocean
and then myths of the ocean itself. Those ones are hard to cage.
Like the electron, infinite and infinitesimal,
the thing you chased for years only to find
it just leads you back to water. The myth of water,
that flickers so fast we pass through it becoming,
for a moment, crystalline ourselves.
Myth of universal language.
How more breed out of that confusion of tongues
and how all of this exists within a synaptic
burst in your brain that you carry with you
everywhere you go, unable to see without remembering,
without whispering, another tale to yourself.
Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his M.F.A. in poetry from the Northeast Ohio MFA program and his B.S. in both chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared in Scientific American, Pithead Chapel, Blue Earth Review, West Trade Review, Ergon, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature and a Master’s of Chemistry at the University of New Brunswick. Website: https://anastasiosmihalopoulos.com/
Emerge Literary Journal 