Sophia Georghiou is an Italian-British poet. Her poems have featured in Wonder Press, Poets Versus Sexual Harassment: An Anthology x UN Women, the6ress, Spectra Poets and Dream Boy Book Club. She was the winner of James Massiah’s Party Poetry Prize in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2021 and 2022.
Email: sophiageorghiou@outlook.com
Twitter: @SophiaGeorghiou
Smart Man
after Anne Carson
He‘s a smart man,
I can’t deny it.
When you get sick from a bad peach, who’s fault is it but your own?
Dusting that pretty you bite
into the flesh.
When I look at Big Ben I long to put my mouth around it.
Those feverish dawns he poked me from sleep with his hard penis,
then dragged me up Hampstead Heath to watch the sun’s slow trajectory.
His intension? Who knows
I decided, sat upon his knee,
skin stretched over my face
like an un-ironed sheet.
My heart now
a shrivelled peach.
Marbles
I stayed on the side-line
with a shipwreck
inside my stomach.
The beatings,
more jolly than harmful,
still encouraged a mixture
of tears, snot to enter
his haloed mouth.
Minutes earlier I had pointed, “Do it. Out the window”
to the glass bowl filled
with turquoise marbles.
The conservatory roof had rumbled, unfilled belly of an emperor whale, as marbles cascaded
down the hip, choked the gutter.
We could hear Nonna’s breath scatter upstairs, could almost make out it’s shedding
over bathroom carpet.
I was silent
while he bared gums,
his chubby hands still
gripping the now-empty glass.
And down he came
from the windowsill,
wrist in rough hand.
I watched while she marked him, let my silence
bruise the air around.
Valley Girls
Last week, with your therapist, you counted ten. Loads! She responded. It’s become a ritual, before coffee you line up each body. Estimate the inch of each waist. Less than your twenty four? Impossible. Order of tits? Vest off in the mirror, yours are the perfect medium. Each Brittany has her own style.
Bought your choker at a market stall, it isn!t amethyst but it!s close.
Your cowboy boots are vintage.
Each Sally has something
on the side. A documentary filmed in Syria, that face she sketched
looks sickeningly familiar.
You need a prize. A hit poem
or a hot picture
interrupted by the real haunting.
Do you still speak? Palms over your face like a stupid toddler. Did he do that thing? ‘That little shaking thing?!’ [Giggles.]
Bad News
There’s no longer vengeance in my plight, only subsequent bumps as I hit the earth. Loopholes where I regain a state of spoilage. You used to brand me as the Crazy Girl and to make matters worse, I was
the one who heated the pipe,
waxed myself shut, begged
to be flown from the island,
to a different capital,
one where the government
spreads me over their velvet hardtop, and after much inspection,
debate over the damages,
order only their finest men to find you, deliver the news of what you did.
Detective
At an age I’ll always remember daddy
had on detective shows, The Saint, Columbo, Inspector Morse…
In every episode, an actress was
murdered. Her replacement sent threatening
letters, words cut from a catalogue.
One time a girl was drugged for containing
secrets I couldn’t follow.
A pack of men who looked like fat wallets
stuffed her inside a suitcase.
Daddy licked brandy from his fine-cut glass,
Mummy poured through a copy of Psychologies
while they zipped the case shut,
slammed the girl inside the boot of a car.
I’d sink beneath the cushions, head bowed
limbs drawn up to my chest
as if I were being trapped
by a similar trunk of old leather.
A trunk I’d have to gnaw
my way out of, only to finish
the episode
with an acid
lingering taste.
On Returning to a Scene of Hunger
The subject’s heart is bored,
same vernacular. You kiss me like
Lennie kills that lamb of a woman,
back against the bedroom door,
smother into silence.
They get theatrical— our arguments
I go blank the second I open
my mouth, slinky winding down
its own set of stairs.
If only you loved me in the beginning,
or left me, snake inside a haystack.