“I believe in all religions.”
            -John Coltrane
    “I pestled my heart in love’s mortar, roasted it & ate it.”
            -Lalla (Kashmir, 14th century)

contemplating my (female) poetry ancestors
not Sappho (but) Hildegard von Bingen & Lalla come to mind
& (unexpectedly) these two cojoined
conjure up saint Coltrane’s image:

a Siamese triplet bound by the blinding intensity of the living light

listen in a uniquely visual way to the sound of this light
turn inward & hear
mandalas meander
on pineappled boundaries of the pre-sexed brain

this
is
Hildegard’s
syntax:

“tu es etiam socia angelorum et civis sanctorum”
(you are indeed the companion of the angels & a citizen of holiness)

***

(enormous transparent lakes
with whirling black dolphins
stay strangely
suspended
high up
in turquoise summer sky)

***

my mind boomed with this view
& half-notes grilled my body
via 3rd & 7th street i was guided to 8th street

“Philip,
on 8th Street
my body reentered the uterine source of life”

it’s – there – where – you’ll – find – Hildegard’s – syntax:

        “caritas habundat in omnia, se imis excellentissima super sidera” (love abounds in all, from the depths exalted and excelling over every star)

Giorgia Pavlidou is an American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. Her work recently appeared or is forthcoming in Caesura, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Clockwise Cat, Ocotillo Review, Strukterriss Magazine, Entropy and Sun & Moon Magazine. She’s an editor of SULΦUR. Additionally, Trainwreck Press launched her chapbook ‘inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel’ in 2021, and Anvil Tongue Books her full length book of poems and paintings, ‘Haunted by the Living – Fed by the Dead’ in May 2022.