Natalie Stamatopoulos 

Four Poems





Dialogue with my shadow



S: I do not hide as much as you expect

N: You speak so many names, outlined in the dark

S: A precision

S: Or a clumsiness,

N: I assume, without bones...

S: Look, I give you canine legs!

S: Wings now!

N: Along with the sun, you notice what I love

N: It rains through me

S: It rains through me





nocturne and lick of lime,


witness, collection of rain, all in a person. Research to summon memory written thru the
eye, sent out. There is no certainty on the subway, in the desert. I summon a Saudi Arabia in
infiniteheat infinitethread, and a Greece where I mean what I say. Facts, hard like knuckles,
are rarely true, no time to rewrite, and I am an object of air, all for air, more palpable at the
moment when the ear opens towind tojoy, of which there is never enough.





Dialogue with the sky


N: You burden the mountains

N: Bring country to the doorframe

S: Can’t wait, can’t wait

N: Darken the feather

N: Scatter the white sheet

N: Pattern a track for leaving

S: Where to look?

N: Are seven times blue

S: How many times around?





Unsought memory returns, 


thin and polite, at the wrong time, hello? Mouthful of wind, rapid like blinking eyes, held up
to the light but I cannot see through it. If I wanted to, if I were like it, if I could stand, if
language could... the words arrive late, there is no poem here.