DIMITRA XIDOUS / KEEPING BEES & Μηδέv | Oὐδέν

(click to view cover)

Keeping Bees

By Dimitra Xidous

2014 / 72 pages / €10 (marked down from €12)
ISBN: 978-1-907682-32-2
Cover art: Ria Czerniak-LeBov

(click to view cover)

Μηδέv / Oὐδέν

by Dimitra Xidous

2020 / 64 pages / €12
ISBN: 978-1-907682-79-7
Cover art: Ria Czerniak-LeBov

DIMITRA XIDOUS is a poet and writer living and working permanently in Ireland since 2011. She is the author of Keeping Bees (Doire Press, 2014) and her poems and essays have appeared in gorse, The Stinging Fly, Room Magazine, The Dalhousie Review and The Real Story UK, among others. She was a finalist in the The Malahat Review Open Season Awards (2014) and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2013). With Patrick Chapman, she is co-editor of The Pickled Body. In 2019, she was awarded a Markievicz Bursary for (S)worn State(s), a poetry collaboration with Kimberly Campanello and Annemarie Ní Churreáin.

SAMPLE POEMS FROM KEEPING BEES

Hung

Whenever anyone asked him about the symbolism
he'd answer 'a bull is a bull and a horse is a horse'
and really, he’s right about that. Still, it was there,
in the horse most of all — a spear through the body,
throat tight, mouth like a vulva ajar choking on the meat
of an intruder — yes, it was there, in the horse most of all
where Picasso got it right, the way a living thing will react
to an attack on the body: he knew to paint it open;
agony exists best in the open, and sometimes also,
where there is a hole.

Leading up to Guernica, he practiced by painting
a horse with a beautiful body — healthy, plump, and
strong as any woman’s before she knows to fear
the sounds of guns, bombs, and unwanted sex. Next to it,
he painted a figure, thin as a stem, hung like a boy.

Bee’s Wing

I
Pull the wing off a bee and it will still
die for the sting.

I think about the times I’ve pulled my feet
out of shoes too small to fit,
how many times
I tore the nail free from the toe
and I wonder

if this is dying for the sting for pulling off a bee’s wing
until it hits me that a toenail is more like the myth
of a complete other thing with wings.

II
Skin breaks for being thin as a bee’s wing
and as I feel your cock go soft, pull back,
it’s clear you died a little death for the sting of it too.

Bodies spent, a myth
with wings stirs:

in the ash, death reigns fertile;
from the ash a bird rises —
from the ash, a new toenail begins.

SAMPLE POEMS FROM Μηδέv | Oὐδέν

Segment —

a line, a cut — a cut, into
a slit —
a slit that
splits a neck

&

breaks the orange
in two, into —

Poaching

Leaking is
a good sign.
So too
loose skin.

Both are
a sign
of readiness,
in time.

In time,
the ground yielded
into a half-circle
& caught you.

This curved
impression returns now
as you gut the fruit,

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