IN THIS BATHROOM

I faked taking my Augmentin. I had an infection in both ears that summer. Mom was standing right up against this door to make sure I wasn’t pouring it down the drain. I had just read The Bacchae, I was young, I thought I was sleek and exhaustive. This was the same summer we shipped water from Greece in containers. The infection traveled through me like a swan right when the night begins to clot—silver, urgent, as if to make the point that one day this head is going to have to choose between being the hot night or being the swan. But this bathroom is dilated by so many strangely painful things: my dog watching me pee, my baby cousin terrified of the shower, Angelina’s thumb stuck in this door which keeps rejecting its lock. The toenail moon. I recently learned that the thumb is technically what made us human. But look:

           fear
                        hear
                                      appear
                                                             blear
                                                                           sear                                                            
                                                            endear
                                              heart

                                                                      
                                                                      learn
                                                                                
                                                                                     near
                                                        linear
                                                                                          
                                                                                                  wear
                                                                       
                                                                        yearn
                                            pearl
                                                                     
                                                                        sear
                        smear
                                         
                                           tear
                                                                           spear
                                                      nuclear

Penelope Ioannou is a Cypriot poet and writer, working with and around words. She recently graduated from Oxford University where she explored the spatial poetics in contemporary translations of ancient texts and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Review of Books. Young Predictions by Cypriot painter Polys Peslikas, published by Big black mountain the darkness never ever comes, is her first book feature, coming out November 2024. Her contribution to the book is part notes on painting and part intimate disclosures that take form as a result of being in close vicinity of Peslikas’ work, both written and painted.