We found each other unexpectedly, unplanned, we kissed extravagantly.
I had not known this language, the continents it crossed extravagantly.
Tell me of your old loves, Phoebe who wooed you, Niki who wanted you
to speak of how you made love, and that you left them so extravagantly.
It is again the pomegranate season, the ripened fruit skins open red seams
like mouths gorgeous with plump seeds ready to be eaten extravagantly.
You liked our rifts in conversation, not the gap in time zones – or me
asleep and you about to sleep but awake and looking for me extravagantly.
The charged hemispheres left us with hour differences, and rioting synapses.
Talk was an aphrodisiac, like the funny smile you withheld extravagantly.
I didn’t want the complications, but your world had a largesse I thought
rare like democracy and romance, a betrayal that developed extravagantly.
Let me describe the ravage, the ways a bitten thing might live its grief,
a Demeter in sudden winter, or me in a country falling apart extravagantly.
And you? Will you go back to the coves and short notes, the fruit seasons?
Ask another Phoebe or Niki how deeply they loved and lost extravagantly?
Let yourself be whispered to, and conjure goddesses, call out my name as it
grows foreign, the fig or Figette lost in the Aegean we swam extravagantly.
Adrianne Kalfopoulou lives in Athens, Greece where she directs the academic writing program at Deree College. Her third poetry collection, A History of Too Much is forthcoming in 2018 from Red Hen Press.
