Digital Poetics #9 Solastalgia: Calliope Michail
“…wretched man, as much as he ate,
so much did he desire again.”
- Callimachus, Hymn VI to Demeter
“At length, when [Erysichthon] had eaten up all his wealth,
he was left with only his daughter…”
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VIII
He stands in a razed jungle
stumps for legs and puckered lips
of rubber
preaching
sensuous appetites
a master of cattle herds
to feed his affluenza
reckless trust
a malaise of neologisms
cornucopian futurist
fracking the bones of the dead;
the gods shall provide if it be
their will
as the skeletal god of hunger
has made its home deep within
the bowels of homo consumericus
and if not
with his newly fashioned
proboscis he will suck
the ocean floors dry
of sand
pulverize every buried stone
and suck and
suck until there’s
nothing
more to take —
he won’t even know he’s
gnawing away at his own
flesh
until there’s nothing left
☾
I stay up into the early hours;
my eyes clicking on themselves.
the garbage truck grumbles
outside my window churning
with rejection. the house yawns
and stretches; floorboards, pipes and
boiler protesting the new day.
☽
cassiterite wolframite coltan
diamonds and gold ore
(for tin) (for tungsten) (for tantalum)
for the wolves of abstraction
that feed and eat and eat
a merry go round you can’t dismount
all and some more some
more
than others
☾
tabs tabs tabstabtabtabtatatatattttttt
burn like the Olympic flame
I hoard with a ravenous desire
/anxiety
so many I can’t make out
the little pictures at the edge they all begin to blend
I can’t keep
/track
what’s what who’s who what’s where and
why
I need it all
even if it means I cannot use
all
how else can I hold all
this information at my fingertips how can I hold all
this information in
— my brain
tips into obsolescence and
slips through like water
no ocean’s big enough to quench
this flame
burns
out —
exit window
and start again
☽
a North American rat snake once
tried to consume itself
and died the second time around —
three concentric coils
Hecate’s impeccable coiffure
place your refus/al
steaming at the crossroads
☾
I stay up until the early hours
my eyes clicking on themselves
drowning fish. (oxy) moronic,
don’t you think? perishing in the
abundance of the oxygen they need
smacking, hopeless, with their big lips
and frantic flapping slits.
☽
recipe for miner’s chowder:
1% copper
99% arsenic, lead and mercury
sprinkle generously on your
Alaskan crab butter-clams cockles and blue mussels
best enjoyed by the familiar glow
of your latest screen
☾
and what of Mestra?
contorting into shapes
practicing autothysia/phagia
all her own, like
an insect going through
the motions – autophagosomes
soma somata somatic
acceleration —
to escape her plight
no NDAs, but good ol’ Poseidon
wrote her a check
of a different kind
and she cashed it again and
again only to come
flying or trotting
back – reinvention for
the complex grinding
since Father, capitalised—
scientists still wonder
whether autophagic activity
in dying cells is
the cause of death
or is actually
an attempt to prevent it.
but even she, oh faithful daughter,
could not save
the man who ate himself.
☽
I stay up until the early hours
my eyes clicking on themselves.
I don’t know what I’m waiting for;
what promises the night pretends to keep,
what each sunrise fails to bring,
why I’m not content just counting
counting —
☾
the slug leaves
a gastronomic trail
along the fig leaf it demolishes
vein to vein
while you and I
stand
blade to blade
trying to lick away the slime and
give birth to something
we can't call new
☽
I may think and so may
you but that is not the point
consciousness
just the tool
ensuring we go forth
and multiply
under reductive viral vice
I think therefore I am therefore therefore therefore I dominate
no one speaks in ancient tongues but
Nemesis keeps the score.
you may think this
scattered tipping smeared
peanut butter and petroleum
spilled milk and populations
and you would be right
or maybe left
and maybe the serpent ate its tail and cannot tell where or how
to begin
or b/end
hopes in chthonic knowledge
that familiar itch and burn of
living singing skin beneath
glazed milk eyes – ecdysis,
rarely comfortable outside trust – necrotic
tissue stretches and sloughs
it writhes
and sheds instead.
*
Calliope Michail is a poet & translator from Athens, Greece, currently based in London. Her poetry
chapbook Along Mosaic Roads(2018) was published with the87press. Other work has appeared
online and in print in Snow Lit Rev, Datableed, Pamenar, Berfrois, Penteract and more.
*
This publication is in Copyright. Calliope Michail, 2020.
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and
we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
