My widowed mother at lunch

plucks filaments of flesh

from near-naked chicken bones.

She splinters each twig-leg,

vacuums the slurry of marrow:

                                                     They used to hit me.

                                                     Με χτύπησαν. Me Htipisan,

masticates a small voice

I’ve never heard before.
She hunches over the fowl’s remains,

rounded shoulders, arms over breasts

ball into a child’s shield.

Her head twitches like a sparrow’s;

left, right, her brown eyes flick up, flick down;

her plastic cataract lenses flash

the phantom of a chthonic hunger;    
                                         They used to hit me. Με χτύπησαν. Me Htipisan.

                                         When I went to rock the baby, during the war, they hit me.

                                         They didn’t give me much to eat. I starved,

mewls this babyish voice again,

now from the back seat of my car,

as I chauffeur her from doctor to doctor.
My knuckles whiten on the wheel

like a mottled backbone,

like the mountain range

that splits her island – Karpathos,

as this famishment spools

a spillage of secrets

so late in life,

like the small, silent histories

of unaccompanied minors,

refugees and war infants;

countless children.