Alex Keramidas is an Italian/Greek poet and writer based in South East London. She enjoys working with translation and connections between different languages and writes poetry predominantly in English, her fourth language. Throughout her writing there is an element of idiomatic tag, with thoughts traced back through a warren of Greek, Italian, French and English as she navigates her tongues and selves in an attempt to turn lingual knots into lanyards. Her poems have appeared in various independent magazines and publications, including Dears Magazine (CH), Litter (UK), Lucy Writers (UK), Fugitives and Futurists (US) and Rivista (IT). Her poetry pamphlet VESTIBULAR TRAINING is forthcoming with Bored Wolves in March 2024.
instagram: @alexandrakera
After Dante’s Inferno
It’s old like the world
I would begin by
asking the poet
to gladly speak to those two
that are going together.
In the wind
they appear to
be light and bright.
Yet ever since the subject,
your softer silence
insisting
that we move
beyond the breakwater.
A boat of variations
carried in the stream
by felled trees.
Each branch
will bow
and be simple.
It was impossible
to know this as
distinct history.
More please
(Paolo and Francesca)
We were reading one day for delight
the desired mouth
to be kissed by this famous lover
from whom I will never be divided
one ghost said it while the other cried
On reading this I came close to vanishing
and dropped like a dead body
this love feels mortuary
not that kind of little death
Pietro della Vigna
By the roots of this malevolent wood I swear
I have not broken faith
with this tree growing its head underground
it has seventy-seven roots and seventy-seven branches
on the seventy-seven roots stand seventy-seven dragons
on the seventy-seven branches stand seventy-seven crows
it tells me what I want to hear but mostly what I don’t
I continue to listen ostensibly
to this eyeless head a logothete
in the mornings when it follows me
in the evenings when I follow it to unrequited places
