almost five months have passed since my last entry. a lot has changed. my trip to south america ended and a bunch of new journeys began. here are some older writings.

Owl's Head

I am sitting on an unusually comfortable bench, and I hear people walking by speaking different tongues, a different language with every person who passes. I recognize the Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish, all of the languages whose countries could pass as my place of origin. Birds are circling the pier, preying on the fish the workers will decide not to take.

"Have you ever seen this fish?" a short woman with frizzed-out curls asks me.

I stare at the fish with wings, flopping on the wooden planks. Little kids have started to gather around the poor thing. It starts clucking. It's running out of breath, it's choking. The short woman giggles.

"The kids love this."

I will miss this; the workers casting a line for fish filled with chemicals, families tightly squeezed onto picnic benches, dusty boom boxes playing sad songs from the old country. Bikers, walkers, roller bladers, psychopaths, love lusting wing-nuts, hot and sticky New York City-ites, Brooklyn-ites. All here. For the breeze. For the view. The broken skyline of downtown Manhattan seems light ages away. And the Statue of Liberty – even further. Their images pale in comparison to the glowing green lights of the Verrazano. One day, I spent a good twenty minutes with a friend trying to figure out the lighting patterns of the red lights on the uppermost tips of this bridge. We sat and stared until we realized there was no pattern.

But right now the sky is cloudy on bottom; clear on top, so the in between part is sprawled out like stretch marks, each cloud a thickening, a fattening of the heavens. I hear an ice cream truck off in the distance. Behind me, a biker rides over garbage and curses.

"Where are you from?" an old man comes up to me and asks. I can tell from his accent that we are not from the same place. "Oh, I thought you were from my country,” he says with a smile. “I have a daughter who looks justa like you." He walks away to the ice cream woman, and I watch as he gets a large vanilla cone and licks.

One day I was initiating a friend into my neighborhood. Usually the initiation process requires a trip to the pier, but along the way, Esperanza and I passed by what locals call The Lost City – a half underground/half aboveground haven of abandoned railroad tracks and freight trains, leading to the water. On a clear night you can even see stars. To get there, you have to hop a barbed wire fence and carefully climb down five flights of rotten stairs in utter darkness. Worn out shoes and cut up tires line the stairs. Dirt rests at the bottom of the steps, and a good ten minute walk is required before you can see the sky again. Esperanza and I decided the pier would have to wait, and several minutes later we were lying out on the tracks, the night above us, admiring the rare opportunity to see stars. Then the tracks started to vibrate, and it turned out The Lost City was not so abandoned – or lost. Glaring yellow lights started scuttling towards us. We made a run for it.

Bay Ridge is alive with sounds; birds in the morning, bad hip-hop blaring from speeding cars throughout the night, and young and drunk olive-skinned men with gelled hair all of the time. But my absolute favorite sound is the fog horn. I live four avenues away from the water, but the sounds of the horn, coming from massive cargo ships in the Bay, carry through the streets and I’ve heard they even go as far as Fifth Avenue. My grandfather was a sailor, and so I have a strong affinity to water and movement. The deep, extended bellows remind me of him and make me want to abandon life on land altogether.

Another time I was with Matthias at the pier, and we saw space ships hovering above the Verrazano Bridge. The sun was setting, and we knew no one would believe us. But right there, in front of our almost unbelieving eyes, first one – then two – then three and four strange flying objects popped into the sky and flew vertically upwards out of sight. Matthias and I stared for a bit, both in confusion and amazement. Then we noticed others around us were staring, too. We all looked at one another and shrugged, an uncanny silence permeating the space between us strangers. Matthias and I continued our conversation about his love life.

Around the corner from my apartment is a Greek pastry shop, Ammonia. When I feel like indulging myself, I buy chocolate truffles covered with almonds, or baklava soaked with honey. I sit on their wicker chairs and stare at the mural of the Mediterranean Sea covering an entire wall. Ammonia sells gum from my mother’s island, Chios. The gum is called mastiha, and it’s made from the sap in trees from the southern part of the island.

When I need healthier food, I go to the Turkish market down the street. Their shelves are sparse, but filled with things like canned hummus, grape leaves stuffed with rice, chopped up almonds, and candy from Lebanon. The owners, an older couple, don’t know my grandfather is from Turkey, and I don’t tell them. Sometimes I see the woman, her head loosely covered by a scarf, rolling out dough for pitas in the back.

The fortune teller is three buildings down from the market. She used to charge only three dollars for a palm reading; now she charges ten. I first ran into her on my way to get falafel on Third Avenue a couple of years ago. She told me I would fall in love while traveling, and it came true. She says my hands tell her I am stubborn and smart, that I don’t love easily and that one day I will make a lot of money. She does her work on the fourth floor of an old apartment with stairs that creak loudly. Her fortune telling room is decorated with beaded curtains and paintings of the Virgin Mary.

Down the block from the market and the fortune teller is the only diner in Brooklyn where getting a cup of coffee and taking a seat guarantees you unlimited refills by a middle-aged white woman wearing an apron, walking around with the hot pot of coffee in her hands. The diner is a relic of what Bay Ridge used to be in the ‘80s, when if you weren’t Italian or Irish, and you were walking the streets at night, either a local or a cop would verbally harass you or beat the hell out of you so you’d get the idea: non-whites not welcome. Before that, Bay Ridge was farms and mansions. A block and a half down my street towards the water are a random three flights of stairs that head down to the street below. Grass and trees with dead limbs crowd over the steps, and I often go there to sit and think. An old man came up to me once with his dog and asked how long I’d been living here. He told me the history of this place; that when he was a little boy Bay Ridge was wide open fields where people grew things like potatoes and herbs.

“Hard to believe, right?” he beamed before walking away. But I sat stunned on the cold cement and stared as the man who must have been one hundred years old walked his dog down the steps to the quiet street below.

Jodi

I am sitting on a blue and white blanket knitted by a Greek woman I do not know. I have just discovered that my calendar – my 99 cent bright yellow calendar - is gone. Disappeared. Its home for the past one and a half years, my rust infested refrigerator, still remains, but the calendar itself, set on July of 2007, is gone. Right now it is six seasons later, November. 2008.

In the last week of July of 2007 you, Jodi Tilton, died. I didn’t have the heart to flip the calendar’s page after you were in the hospital, brain tissue hemorrhaged, a machine pumping your heart. You died, August came, but the calendar remained as was. A reminder, a backdrop, a part of the scenery of my kitchen. The magnet that held the calendar also held a drawing of a bird, wings sprawled, crayoned by Conor the week you were in the hospital, and a photo of you and Beth. The photo and drawing are still there, held by that same magnet. But now the calendar is gone. I checked the sides of the refrigerator, under the refrigerator, and even in the cabinets surrounding the refrigerator. Nothing and nowhere. When I realized the calendar was gone my head started swirling, and it wouldn’t stop, and it hasn’t stopped since.

Right now I am imagining where my calendar must be. I just saw a television special about bald eagles on channel 13. Flying, the show says, is intuitive for the birds. They practice in their nests, hopping up haphazardly, before they take their first plunge and fly. They are not taught what to do with their wings, they just do it. Landing is the most difficult thing for a bald eagle to learn. They showed clips of baby bald eagles smacking into branches, attempting to land, letting us know that this is real.

I told a friend about the calendar on Wednesday and how I can’t let go. One time I looked at the calendar and thought of taking it down. I stood and stared eye level with it, contemplating if I should. But I didn’t.

Now it’s Sunday, and it’s not there anymore. I am wondering where it could have gone.

I am imagining my calendar – my beloved, cheap calendar – with equally cheap wings, flying through the clouds over Bay Ridge. The wings are not fully feathered yet. The bright yellow pages are hazily leaping through the sky, taking off from this three story brick building in Brooklyn and flying upwards. And somewhere, not too far off, you are sitting, laughing a belly laugh. My calendar’s pages are flip-flopping in the wind, and months and days do not matter anymore.

Spring/ A Family History

A lamb roasts every year in my family’s yard. It lays in a metal, cut-in-two garbage can, surrounded most closely by the people from the old country, the people who came here by boat. A coal fire burns inside the metal, roasting the animal every year, the first Sunday after the first full moon of Spring. My giagia squeezes lemon onto the lamb’s crinkling brown skin; some juice seeps inside and some slides off, landing into the coals, making tiny yellow-orange sparks flare up. The fire cackles when the lamb or lemon juices make its way to the bottom of the pit, and spits up the sparks but also strings of black smoke.

I remember my papou, Yianni, tell me stories of children dying in the streets of starvation in the port city outside of Athens, where he was born. The Germans, who were occupying Greece, had cut off all food entry into the country. It was the worst in the cities. At least in the islands or up north you grew your own food, you could hide some away from the soldiers before they took your crops. But in the city all you had were the rations given to you, enough to starve off of. The smoke from the decomposing, burning bodies, burnt to prevent disease, would rise through the city. Athens stunk of death. No one would claim their dead; a dead person’s rations could save another family member’s life.

I sprinkle oregano onto the lamb as my brother turns the stick the lamb is holding onto. Coal smoke and herb smells seep into all of our noses and make us hungry. The lamb takes half a day to cook. At dawn, the family comes over. By one in the afternoon, our bellies are almost full of lamb.

At midnight the night before, we eat magiritsa to break 40 days of fasting, a soup filled with all of the lamb’s insides: its heart, lungs, brain, intestines. For the forty days before Easter, we cannot eat all foods from warm-blooded animals. During the first hour of that Sunday we eat along-side white candles, waxy and burnt out, left over from the midnight church service. The priest begins this service with one lit candle; he passes his fire along to another person’s, and eventually the dark, incensed, dome of the church is lit by small specks of each person’s fire. When the fire is lit and the prayers are done, everyone follows the priest outside and slowly walks once around the church, following his deep-bellowed chants.

The Germans began their occupation of Greece in 1941, right around Easter. My papou left Athens and headed to Chios, an island a twenty-minute boat ride away from Turkey, where he knew people and where there would be more food. He went with my Thea Nitsa, and they took a long, dangerous boat there together from Athens. They found the family of Katerina, a girl he had known since he was an even younger boy, on the edge of a mountain, in a small town. She and my papou would later get married.

Where my giagia comes from, Vrodandos, there are only two churches, white-walled and with bright blue domes. The churches build hundreds of rockets and fire them at one another, without the intention of harm, to celebrate Easter at midnight every year. Vrodandos is a small sailor town on the eastern coast of Chios. They say this tradition started with sailors defending themselves from pirates with cannons and turned into an Easter ritual of rocket-firing. Later, when under Ottoman rule, all cannons were taken away, the people of Vrodandos turned to rockets instead. The rockets stream huge streaks of red and orange fire into the sky, almost like fireworks. Then the feasting begins.

For my papou, the situation was worse in Vrodandos than in Athens. The German soldiers took all crops and guns – no meat or vegetables could be found anywhere. My papou would walk for two days to find an orange tree with rotten oranges, which he would bring back to his family. The oranges, filled with worms, would last only for a couple of days. So he and Thea Nitsa escaped – for the second time – to Cesme, a tiny town in Turkey, by boat. The island was surrounded by German soldiers on boat. If their boat - small, sinking, and overflowing with desperate, starving people -was discovered, they would all have been killed. In Cesme, they lived in an abandoned theater for Greek refugees.

From Cesme he headed to Cyprus, which was still a declared British colony. He lived there for many years, in a refugee camp in the mountains, before world war two ended and the civil war began. When those wars were done, he had some time to escape Greece as a mechanic on a boat before another war, a dictatorship installed by the United States, would begin.

For the meal on Easter day, we make tzatziki, a thick yogurt sauce mixed with garlic and cucumber, to eat with the lamb. We dye red eggs and see whose egg is the strongest by cracking our eggs onto one another’s. We eat avgolemono, lemon and egg chicken soup and spanakopita, spinach and feta cheese baked in thin, fried dough. Later, we eat koulourakia, warm butter cookies, and big, sweet bread with a red egg baked in its center. While we eat, we listen to tapes play music made of bouzouki and klarino in my mother’s old boom-box, the wailing and old stories carrying through its sounds, reminding us of where we come from and how things have changed.

homage to weeds

joy takes more
courage than grief -
i will rip these weeds
from the hot earth,
hold the dandelions up above my head,
remember the dead,
then offer half the weeds
to the mediterranean sea.
i will chew basil
and suck sweet apricots
juice from oranges
will drip off of my lips,
i will kiss a priest's hand,
watch strangers dance in the street -
cherries will be sweeter,
my teeth will grow in pink,
i will fall in love with boats and water
and nausea, i will
grow old with flowers in my hair.
i will laugh and show my crooked
teeth to people i wish
loved me,
i will sing old songs
with new words
and make a stew
with what i find at my feet.

Constantinople/Istanbul

I am standing on soil
where the color of blood
is the nation’s flag,
where my family, uprooted
came to the U.S., and

I wonder
if my ancestors see me

when riot police surround us
in Teksim square,
where my papou used to live, where
boys holding hands
and too many colors
scare people walking past.

Burcu just laughs
and holds my hand,
she tells me I am shy
for hesitating to kiss
in front of machine guns and tear gas
intended for us.

now an old man stares,
fingering red prayer beads
and squeezing
when he sees burcu’s thin lips
and brown-string hair
touch my skin.
I wonder
if my ancestors see me

and what they think
of tongues
locking with women,
and I wonder
if they’d defend the gun
or laugh with burcu
and hold my other hand.