Anastasios Mihalopoulos
It’s what a forest fire feels when the wind shift pushes it back towards the village it just burnt. The clank and drop of suitcases on the hardwood floor after a long journey. The way water drifting in a river confuses itself into ocean. The time your girlfriend’s dad asked where you were from and you paused just a little too long provoking his saying, It’s not a hard question, son. How you know that nostos and algos translate to return and pain but the actual suffering is not from trying to return but having no idea where the place you want to return to is. The scent of her shampoo in your hair the day after that day on Limonaki Beach. The two of you saved a seal from a fisherman who was mad at it for taking his fish. Cracking through a full almond for the first time, hull, then shell, then kernel then seed. Just like Papou did with his three-fingered hand. A taste of the right kind siphoned from a drink. The mastic gum aroma swirling around your nose, you sip in, perhaps too much, of that old place. Home, but not quite.
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Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek-/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his MFA in poetry from the Northeast Ohio MFA program and his B.S. in both chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Scientific American, Blue Earth Review, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.