POETRY

The lament of the tearful mountain, Gramma, Thessaloniki 1994

And the Sphinx spoke, Magdonia, Thessaloniki 1995

The bitter lemons, Violaris, Nicosia 1995

The one hundred centifolias of Puglia, Interbalkan Book Centre, Thessaloniki 1997

The ambrosia of the rocks, Kontosoros, Corfu 1997

The cyclamen's tear, Athens 1998

The gate of the northern winds, Kyriakidis, Thessaloniki 1998

The prophecies of the trees, Dritero, Tirana 1998

One thousand seashells, EIYAPOE, Ioannina 1999

The prow of the stars, Ianos, Thessaloniki 2001

The fate of the helichrysum, Ianos, Thessaloniki 2003

The elixir of the rock, TOENA, Tirana 2004

The christening of the birds, Onoufris, Tirana 2005

The saddle of the moon, Tipothito, Athens 2007

The heraldics of the thrush, Kastaniotis, Athens 2008

The signs of sorrow, Foinikas Publications, Athens 2009

Sundials, Mandragoras, Athens 2011

Household snake, Foinikas Publications, Athens 2012

The supplicatory canon of the sunset, Foinikas Publications, Athens 2014

Laurels river, Tipothito, Athens 2015

Brief Anthology, Akti, Nicosia 2017

The grass of shiver, Foinikas Publications, Athens 2017

The awakening of the sleeping eyes, Nikas, Athens 2020

SHORT STORIES

Sins of the night, Kedros, Athens 2006

Thymes of the northern winds, Nikas, Athens 2022

NOVELS

The moon's plough, Psychogios, Athens 2004

Of concord and other demons, Nikas, Athens 2018 (shortlisted for The Athens Prize for Literature)

The night wanderer, Filntisi, Athens 2019

The snow advances, Nikas, Athens 2021

Agias Anastassias 30
142 32 Perissos

Maternal Temple

A priestess now, she walks to the altar of the fountain, bent, exposed, deeply absorbed in the waters, she offers invocations, libations, raises her head shyly to the ceiling of the sky, covered by God’s offshoots, with naked breast, to wash, to comb with unction in the healing waters, to perfume her bosom. Her boobies were quince different in her youth, that sacrosanct enticing temple of the teat that nurtured our world. What happened, where has it gone her left breast? What happened, where has it gone her rosy, roseate teat, the spout where fits of milk gargled into my inflamed lips? She takes out her blessed, her holy only breast now and holds it hard in the lunar fist. The other has gone, she says, gruesome stabs cutting metastasis’ storm and maybe bitches ate it down in mortuaries, in vaults. Or, maybe, professors emeritus experiment with her bosom’s cells. Unibreasted now the mother stands in her handicap, she washes her only breast and stuffs it back inside, because it’s well in there, he has forgotten it and Charon should not see it. Because, she says, he might have cut it off as well, the black Charon, when he passed on his black horse by her alley one day.

The Isles of Greece

And all the Danaans’ships,

From Troy returning,

Were haunted into Greek isles.

Coffins are no more

And now we’ll bury them naked,

In the buff, without cerements in the bowels of the earth

Shrouded in the moon’s bedsheets.

Translated by Klety SOTIRIADOU

Τhe Double

A tree i am, a shady tree, a hard trunk, a pregnant womb within me is always swollen in summers and winters. Some are the twigs that struggle in the wind and endure, some are the twigs that crack in the nights and jolt my trunk, some are my sleeping buds. I creak all over caught by my roots on the rocks in the tornadoes and beat the weeping. I tremble at the squeaks of the sleeping eyes scratching and tickling, my sap circulates, the skin softens, they slip away like the helpless birds where they emerge from their shell and take to flight.

Athens, May 2020

The Scarf

To Yannis Kontos

I am a city boy, he says, away from blackbirds and trees. Friend John, I say, leave the blackbirds and the trees to me, let's at least do something good for our mulberry trees. You don't see them pruned and stumped, bodies decapitated, they will soon wake up, the sleeping buds will bloom, take off your curled up scarf of tree shrub winter summer scarf around your neck, untwist it to wrap them. But, he says, these are not mulberry trees on the sidewalks, they are decapitated statues, and they have no neck to wrap a tree plant over my scarf. They'll be snatched up by the north winds and carried around in the city sky in a shirttail. And then I can't get my neck out. Winter has trawled yet, I'm not a mulberry stump and not a decapitated statue, I have both a head and a neck and for where I've moved, it's limited the cold, it stings. And I'm not learned. Better with a scarf in winter summer, than with a naked neck of a bare-necked ferruginous turtle.

Athens, January 2014