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.