Natasha Remoundou - Ode to Caffeine

Natasha was born and raised in Athens, Greece. She is an academic researcher lecturing in literature, drama, and critical theory and has held academic posts as an Assistant Professor at Qatar University, the National University of Ireland, Galway and the American College of Greece. She is also a volunteer English teacher for migrants/refugees campaigning to end Direct Provision. She holds a Ph.D. in Classics & English, a M.Sc. in English Literature:Writing & Cultural Politics, and a B.A. in English & American Literature. She has published chapters on Irish studies in edited volumes and journals and is currently writing her monograph on Irish theatre and rights. Her poems have appeared in Melodia magazine, The Anthology of Young Greek Poets, her poetry collection “The Dialect of Water” in Writing Home (Dedalus Press) and her essay in the Correspondences Anthology (The Stinging Fly). Her homes are Athens, Edinburgh, Doha, and Ireland since 2003. https://www.dedaluspress.com/product/writing-home-the-new-irish-poets/ https://www.rte.ie/culture/2019/1210/1098209-correspondences-the-anthology-giving-voice-to-direct-provision/

Fifth Floor

No visitor, no lover, acrobat, earthquake, child, not even breeze or wave in Lily’s lounge.

Five or six meandering frames the scenography of her dining room, the smell of naphthalene: her greatgrandmother’s portrait, jaundiced

(Athens, 1897)

Dido and Aeneas

in happier times, methodically angular aging every night.

Invisible straight lines tittilate her eye adjusting to level the disorder, measure gratification, straighten indulgence, fix deviating borderlines,

then sit and idolize the guilty symmetry of correction from a distance.

They found her in her armchair one morning with hammer and nail in hand,

a singing swan.

Ode to Caffeine

Ι know your many faces: free drug for leaving cert. students coca-cola for breakfast, air-condition, secret fags, and on ice,

stiff-necked addiction for memorizing historical dates, savouring the taste of a sharp mind.

There used to be a coffee factory on our street corner selling dates, dry figs, salted arab pistachios, almonds and walnuts.

and it was always the fragrance of the freshly ground coffee beans absorbing the neighborhood, that made me feel sick deep down in my guts

while others stopped to relish it everytime we used to pass by on our way to school early in the morning.

And in class, the breath of our teacher, tobacco and greek coffee without sugar taught me what men are,

sitting around coffee shops filtering secrets inside their alabaster coffee cups leaving at the bottom an obsidian dampness -the remains

for a woman who knew how to “tell the coffee” by turning the cup upside down on the saucer to read the future in primordial coffee stains .

Or when my paralyzed father asked me to prepare his coffee in the late afternoon and I did it -not out of mercyto eat spoonfulls of sugar and drink the coffee foam uncensored for the tip and for forgiveness.

In myriad cups of tea, charcoal karak chai with milk and cardamom and bitter arabic coffee steaming in the heatwave of the Corniche.

In Mayo, I have been kept warm overdosing in tea mugs when the oil had run out.

Dark dust from Calcuta or from Mount Parnonas dressed in delicate transparent suits,

I keep your darling leaves in IKEA glass jars exposed to visitors of the kitchen museum.

You spark my nervous creative system in front of a blank page: we sit and stare at each other for hours harboring some consummate thing.