Surrealist Prose Poems By Giorgia Stavropoulou

Giorgia Stavropoulou is an MFA candidate with the Manchester School of Writing, UK, living in California. Currently she’s working on a novel but she also writes poetry inspired by the work of LA based surrealist poet Will Alexander. Other influences are Indian surrealist author of short fiction Naiyer Masud and the fiction of Roberto Bolaño. Her work has been published in journals and in an anthology. 


Sonic Pisces Swimming in Skin 

Part I 

When you talk, you can’t see them
But they’re in you, and around you
You can feel them with your lips
Small slimy ones gently zigzag out of your vocal cords 
They escape through your mouth when you whisper
Slow inert ones crawl out of your throat; 
You can feel their scales when you talk while drunk
Fast shark-like ones bust out of your face
They irritate your esophagus when you shout

The fish I’m talking about are
Acoustic
Their scales sonic
The fibers of their flesh: decibels and particles 
They appear beneath the surface of your skin
You can see the contours of their floundering fins 
Their twisting tail
Their almond-shape
While stroking their hide
Which is, of course, your own skin
The Sonic Pisces ovulate Syllabs


Part II

Inside me sonic Pisces swim in sand
In and out of my skin
And back into my mouth
Millions of scales rub my lips
Thousands of fish wriggle through my flesh
Like parasitic worms, larvae made out of sound
They exit my eyes
And float on the surface of my gaze
These words have fins and gills
Rubbing themselves against my face 
I can feel their slimy scales
And with slime and mud
They re-draw my mask

After repainting my shape
They dive back into my pelt
I touch my face
My fingers penetrate my liquid hide
The mud has changed into clay
And I mold my meat
My cheeks, my mouth
My chin, my nose, 
And my eyes
I am the sculptor of my own skin 



A Room Not of My Own 

Something is cackling
Something cracks

Something crackles and crumbles

Moving through and out of the walls of this room
Jumping onto my body

Drilling into my orifices
Sizzling my body parts

Then it starts baring trembles

My mattress turns sweaty and restless
My eyelids start shaking

I see a second tremble
It crunches its way lispingly through the air

Gradually it transforms into a whisper
I can feel it crawling into my ear, like a little insect-fish

There is neither carpet nor desk in this room but there is an empty chair.

The curtains are made of thin red fabric.
They allow for the light to glide into my skin

I see a fish vibrating, as if it was spoken five or six times, becoming a larger or, rather, a thicker word.

It swims through the hallways of my body and just before it slips inside one of the other rooms, it explodes - in a rather dull way – into, surely hundreds of smaller words:

The words spread and try to glib, or rather slip into different rooms.  

In this room, all sorts of words swim.
 Some devour and stuff themselves daily with light

One of the thicker fish lives here with me

From the mouth of this fat fish, sometimes a thin fish crawls,
crackling and giggling,

Baring thousands of microscopic crabs
ferociously squirming up my spine


I am Hellenic Landscapes of Sonic Light

To those who believe I merely escape in language
I declare  syllabs to be my primary allies
And my currency the skin of sound

The alliance I talk about is fluid and 
Its essence wrapped in pure particle 

What I see is sand drenched in phonemes and pixel-derma 
Earth engulfed by libidinal waves of electromagnetic pigments
As the surface of my skin 

I am a choreography of shades of turquoise 

Smoldering in floating magma
An opera of shadow as black non-pigmented quantum 

In this way, I as landscape transmutes from mere cartography 
Into eloquent cold fire, liquid

I hereby declare that the frequency of my nutrition is brilliance
Oscillating through eternally black stellar mountains

As if my erotic excess is fused with electrons of excitement 
Filled with ocular, electric lust
Oracular 

In this liquid field
Volcanic spurs spit fetuses of transparent sonic drones
Bubbling word-sounds
Spinning glimpses of an undifferentiated intelligence
Noisy
Inchoate
Affected 
Hybrid

Tactilely and tectonically
Twisting the texture of language  



The Black City

Female sounds reached the territory of the black city
They speak to the fish while sliding, gliding, sneaking and slitting into mute buildings
The fish have no organs
Still they whisper, and through them

The buildings crack,
The bricks lament, 
The city moans 

From afar, other sounds approach
And from further away? 
Even more sounds: groans and rattles 

And then, there are the whispers again, sneaking into hallways, hiding in storage rooms where they sob like little children 

There they transform again into fish
The fish sob, groan and moan too, like sad women 
The female sounds stroke their cheeks
The fish hum while baring organs 
The organs speak a mute language – understood only by the buildings 

The fish, whisper,
The buildings crack, 
The bricks lament

Female sounds exit again the territory of the black city


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