Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five November-December 2024
Prey, poems Natasha Remoundou-Howley.
Prey
Look,
across the provincial abattoir
a stray cat has paused,
a solitary witness.
Behind the glass
she studies
the spectacle of
an anatomy lesson
from a safe distance.
Hanging from steel hooks,
polished, severed, still dripping,
pig heads, limbs, guts,
and a goat’s heart
repose their defeat
on the marble counter.
Fresh in order,
carved with care,
the price of flesh
laid bare.
When the butcher
raised his blade
over the lifeless muscle,
I saw the cat
through the school bus window
walking away
with a live sparrow
in her mouth.
white ink
after Hélène Cixous
The writer enters the forest
to write again
she-woman-escapee
to write in secret
in white ink.
She writes
for the things
she only knows
cartographer of forms,
chaosmos-giver,
about your childhood friends
with the face veils.
She writes the margin,
the harem, and the abyss,
Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale.
She writes with you
little girl from Oran
for causing trouble
unafraid of dripping blood
on your dress.
She writes
unafraid of lacking,
the second underage mother
she’s ever had,
you gave her
ladder,
labyrinth,
breast,
a country
to come into writing
with a raucous laughter.
She, too a phantasm
in flight
ever/overflowing,
ever/over-failing
with you,
Hélène, Simone, Julia.
Because in owing you
her hair
and her upbringing,
listen how
she murmurs
an alien mother tongue
etched
under skin tissue
with soil
water
and vowels.
Unsilenced,
she’s left with two hands
to carve
your root prints
in seabeds deep.
© Natasha Remoundou-Howley
Natasha Remoundou-Howley was born and raised in Athens, Greece. She is a bilingual writer, poet, translator, and literary scholar based in Ireland since 2003. Her work has been published by Dedalus Press, The Stinging Fly, Abridged, The Madrigal, Púca, Live Encounters, and ΑΣΣΟΔΥΟ and presented in festivals in Ireland and Greece. Her translations have been selected for programmes and cultural events held at Princeton University, Galway2020, University College Dublin, the Linenhall Arts Centre and published by Asymptote Journal, The Gallery Press, the Trinity College Journal of Literary Translation, Le Ortique, and Παράσιτο. She lectures in critical theory and English literature at University College Dublin and the American College of Greece.