Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2025
Beige is Not a Colour, poems by Angela Costi.
Beige is Not a Colour
Face Time with Cousin Phillipo
you seem bonier around the shoulders
if we hugged
it would be awkward
you’re keen to describe your studio as a raft
where you write for Simerini
about football’s failure in Cyprus
you say Alexander the Great was Greek
as you walk over to your large laminated
map of the world stuck to your wall
from your desk you like the view
of red push pins you’ve forced
into the lands you’ve travelled
a solar system of pins in Europe
a bouquet of fireworks in South East Asia
a zig-zag path into the Middle East
you fiddle with a pin
too close to my screen
I roll my chair back
you return to your map
become the smaller person
hovering the pin over a land
out loud you say Egypt!
as the pin stabs through
I want to ask Why Egypt?
But your face and voice conquer
my screen Alexander liberated them
from the oppressors…
Full Frame
we watch her speaking to loaded guns we are very good cowards eating
our popcorn licking our choc tops sitting very quiet in the dark she scoffs
calls them skoolikia tells them to squirm back to their holes she is more
personal to us than a saint or a god in her traditional dowdy dress with her
outstanding breasts thrust towards ocean as she commands her fleet of ships
outliving her husbands and sons and balikaria killed by cannons and swords
until one shot is fired she falls back into the dark of her house back into
our darkness with only seconds to live she says I was spared the death
of war to die inside my house help me to see the sea she says the old
man lifts her up to watch the freedom of waves and there is something
else she sees it could be her dying son we think but the view is blurred
with our tears