From Natalie Goldberg’s essay “Blue Lipstick and a Cigarette Hanging Out of Your Mouth”: "One small prop can often tip your mind into another place.”
ZILIA BALKANSKY-SELLES is a writer and actor based in Bloomington, Indiana. Her poems have been published in the online journal Comparative Woman, and in the books Trigger Warnings, edited by Joan Hawkins and Kalynn Brower, and Stormwash: Environmental Poems, edited by Hiromi Yoshida. Her work appeared in the 2023 Ryder Magazine, Poetry Edition and has been presented at spoken-word events hosted by the Writers Guild at Bloomington.
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Zilia, what have you brought for us?
"Helen—After Troy"
It was a long time ago.
They are all dead, or gone
somewhere. I don’t know.
It was not the first time. I had
been taken before. First Theseus,
then Paris. He was such a boy. Beautiful,
maybe. Desire creates beauty
in both directions.
I knew what it was to be taken,
to be a part of the game.
The boys and men play. The women
work, have babies, grow old, undesirable.
But the boys play.
The women are gone. Cassandra fallen.
Hecuba, wily, if unsung, gone, long gone.
Odysseus, that bastard, gets all the glory,
while Penelope holds fast his lands.
It is always so.
The bloodied fields before Troy all
washed by time and rain, and new
people who will soon forget.
The face that launched a thousand ships.
Ugh. The men jumped at any occasion to
play war and sail away.
The olive groves shake in the wind
of the late winter rains.
The sea is dark and full of bones.
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"The Grasshopper’s Curse"
When Eos asked Zeus for immortal life for her human love,
she forgot to ask for endless youth, unending vigour,
radiant vitality for he she hoped would accompany her
through endless days.
In the end, or at least the change of heart, realization and frustration,
she, under her own volition, turned the senile old man,
withered and ranting, to a grasshopper.
A different version would have him prune up
under the weathering of time to the agile,
exoskeletoned creature, harbinger of luck and fortune.
We don’t always know what we ask for
when we ask for the easy solution,
the obvious path.
Djinn, compelled to grant wishes to their inadvertent human liberators,
know the subtleties of desire—
and the humans’ easy distraction to surface gain.
However long our view, it’s not long enough.
Unintended consequences litter the path of our daily walking
while the grasshopper chirrups from beneath the debris.
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"The Graiae"
Leave it to old men to tell the tales to the young men and women
of the Graiai sisters, born old, born horrid,
with one eye, one tooth among the three of them.
Toothless two-thirds of the time, unless a sister was generous.
Blind, most of the time, until the precious eye was shared.
But what an eye!
What vision to hold one steady in the dark until the next turn.
Enough to fill with light and knowledge the time and space of swaying in the wind,
waiting, grasping, for a turn,
fumbling for the slick, soft orb to roll on the fingertips
to pop into place.
And that tooth.
That tooth could gnaw right through the toughest meat,
the conundrum and quandary of lost heroes, so called,
those fumbling men who could not see the way,
who mistook a shared eye for misfortune,
and a shared tooth for hunger.
You've been listening to the poems of Zilia Balkansky-Selles on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
