"Head between the Knees," 2nd Prize Poetry Winner of the Filitsa Sofianou-Mullen Creative Writing Competition

On seldom late nights when I forget the mind too clear

I pretend not to fear what dreams may come

And close my eyes over the flashing neon warnings

That play old family movies through the fisheye lens of the panic attack.

How normal we seemed:

Father’s rakia-soaked dinner silence –

He’d visibly buckle under the weight of anger, never aloud in our presence,

While mother passive-aggressively did dishes –

They waited for the kids to be in bed, oblivious

To the concrete thinness of communist-built walls

And we imagined them in an endless game of charades

Trying to guess misery behind closed doors,

For the children.

Mother teaching us to do with little:

Learn where the thrift stores were that sold clothes by the pound,

Steam the stale bread, sew up the holes, glue up the gaping, worn shoe soles,

If not too rotten, put it in a stew and you won’t need

To buy things when you can make your own –

From food to furniture, self-sufficient, self-deprecating, self-medicated –

With whatever you have lying around.

Brothers, unknowing enemies in the war of my siblinghood –

I loved them with thieving distrust, eyes always weighing

The bigger piece of chicken they got at the table, 

Heart always breaking over the gift of three seconds

They spent frozen in mother’s scolding green eyes

When caught skipping school, while I played good daughter,

Toiled over grades and blended invisibly into the wallpaper.

I scan for traces of happiness:

Thirty years later, choking on 4am panic on the bathroom floor

As the whole world seems my brothers

And I seem to swing wildly from the shadows

Of my frugal mother at work and my choleric father after,

Crushed under wave after wave of throbbing dark matter stuck in my throat

And roaring rivers of red wine I swim to help swallow the day.

I struggle not to rifle through childhood memories

Late at night, alone and afraid

That I might find myself crying

Over a stranger’s diary.