Ithaca at the Hospice

I recite Ithaca to my uncle
because he used to read it to me

and reminisce about his native Smyrna
with the salty ache Cavafy captured.

For sixty-seven years he traded
petroleum and cacao with the rising ocean.

I need to work—his motto. Down the steps
in his son’s arms, wheelchair to the office.

Can you front me a loan? he asked last month.
Today his tongue is a dry thorn,

eyes glistening with ointment.
A few puny trees trim the traffic

but the hospice faces a wall
ascending to the thick, dioxide sky.

I read to him Ithaca again, the poem
about Odysseus’ homeward return.

In the sails of his lungs,
nostos and Aegean air.

First published in The Marrow, Issue 1, June 2024

Perserverance

Today Perseverance gathered
its first Martian rock,
sealed it in a capsule,
sent it across silence.

Sotheby’s auctions Napoleon’s hat,
a dredger remains lost
in the untimely thaw
of new Arctic waterways.

Last month during the wildfires,
I was vacating my flat,
failing every pregnancy test
as smoke threaded the stairwell.

In the ultrasound my womb
looked like a stone.
My baby-wide pelvis
uninhabited.

I brush out another handful
of hair, tell myself: I never
wanted children anyway,
trace routes on an Arctic map.

First published in Poetry Wales, Spring 2024

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Vasiliki Albedo is a poet living in Greece. She is the winner of the Hammond House Literary Prize for Poetry, The Poetry Society’s Stanza competition, Poetry International’s tiny chapbook competition and the Live Canon pamphlet competition. Her poems have appeared in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The London Magazine and elsewhere. She was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, The Sylvia Plath Prize, The Oxford Poetry Prize, The Bridport, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize, and commended in the National Poetry Competition, the Hippocrates prize, the Ambit competition and others.