Meditation on the Sources of Magnificent Desolation 

I was trying to conjure your last irradiated face.
It was what it might have been to be alive, but gently.

It was what it might have been to be awash in Implacable.
The belfry of the soul gobsmacked as tulips.

I wish I could write to you, but the glimmering gangplank to
the cerulean world has since been lopped off. Here: some horse-heart

a slightly-more-grown-baby has incandescently crushed
& a rosebush in the shape of a human hand. Otherwise, no sudden changes.

Suppose I could recover the prescient salt of every year
you have been witness to. The fortunate thunderclap of first to final

glance in the mirrored ceiling of an elevator. Suppose I could lift
the penultimate veil of Then you slipped behind.

Its hush-colored, yes. I am never any closer to saying
what I mean: Love is a remarkable habit. Someone has plucked flies

from the air like diamonds. Someone has kissed
your mouth so as to partially erase it.

Elisávet Makridis is a Pushcart-nominated poet raised between Queens, NY and Greece. She studied psychology and poetry at Sarah Lawrence College where she was the recipient of the Andrea Klein Willison Poetry Prize (2015) and the Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry (2016). Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly (finalist for the 2018 Poetry Open Prize), Crab Creek Review, Grist, Frontier Poetry, and The Poetry Annals. She can be found online at elisavetmakridis.com or on Twitter: @elisahvet. Her heart swims somewhere in the Mediterranean.