Storyteller of the Week

 

Andrea Potos

 

 

Andrea Potos left recreating a photo of  her mother Penny Kosmopolou  at Ocean Beach in San Francisco 

Andrea Potos is author of several poetry collections, including Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press,) Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books), Mothershell (Kelsay Books), A Stone to Carry Home (Salmon Poetry), An Ink Like Early Twilight (Salmon Poetry), We Lit the Lamps Ourselves (Salmon Poetry) and Yaya's Cloth (Iris Press). She has received the William Stafford Prize in Poetry from Rosebud Magazine, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review, and several Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her poems can be found widely in print and online, most recently in The Sun, Poetry East, One Art, Braided Way, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (Storey Publishing), and The Path to Kindness (Storey Publishing). Andrea lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She was a longtime bookseller in independent bookstores there. She still needs to be surrounded by books.

By Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

I have been a huge fan of Andrea Potos poetry ever since reading her wonderful poems about her Greek grandmother and grandfather. She creates heartwarming, heartbreaking powerful poems in her signature style. I have selected some of my favorites that show who Andrea is as a person and a poet.
 

 

 Sometimes, I Notice

I may have become
my mother—wearing a soft
plaid blouse she would wear,
my mouth turning its corners into a smile
at small delights:
relief of the heating pad
on my spasmed back muscle,
a plate of homemade ravioli
from my neighbor two doors down.
How to explain the wholeness
I inhabit, as if I have learned how to abide
with her lost physical form,
and she and I are together, both of us
giggling, a sound suddenly
like the tinkling of ice cubes
in the tall glass of soda she enjoyed each night.

From Her Joy Becomes  

 

 

  

Andrea’s Greek Grandparents Aristea and George Kosmopoulous at an Easter dinner

Remembering Easters in Childhood

Besides my Yaya’s juicy lamb and potatoes,
her round gold bread planted with
a blood-red egg in its center,

it was the clothes I got to wear
that felt like dress-up time:
white patent leather marijanes
newly risen from shoeboxes,
pastel dresses with layers that made me
want to twirl like the ballerina
on top of my jewelry box;
and a shiny white barrette
for my hair finally outgrowing its pixie cut.

My mind still takes photographs
of me standing beside my sister and our cousins,
on our Yaya’s front lawn in the late 52nd Street air
when the newly strengthened sun still gleamed
above the peaked roofs of the neighborhood.

From Joy Becomes Her

Watching the Sound of Music For the First Time Since I Was a Girl in My Yaha’s Den

I am mesmerized by all the fabrics:  
Julie Andrew's butterfly sleeves, her seafoam
green dress, the gentle swirling as she walks;
all the pinafores, suspenders and flouncy skirts,
the ponderous drapes she yanked from their rods
and transformed into playclothes for seven children,

the way my Yaya would, perched at her mahogany Singer
sewing machine; she could conjure almost anything:
long sleeves in one hour for her daughter's prom dress,
pleated drapes for dining rooms, velvet Christmas dresses,
wool jumpers and floral quilted bathrobes for us girls,
even my sister's wedding gown: a thousand seed pearls
planted by hand over months and months, a silken garden
for my sister, from my grandmother the water
and the light that grew us.

 

Deciding to go to Greece for the First Time

It was in late August,
I watched my 8-year-old girl,
her ponytail stained with summer gold.
She turned to smile as she dipped her foot in the pool,
her whole slim body into the wavery blue.
With a long exhalation, I lay back, I let the word
float across me—motherland—I felt it
sink with the sun through my skin
down to the source,
my grandmother, my mother's mother Aristea,
who arrived from the Old Country, a bride of 19.
We lived in the flat above her, an easy journey
down the winding stairwell to her
open kitchen door,
simmering smells of lemon
and oregano, almond and anise seed.
Gone for these eight years, she glows
like a pilot light beneath the days.

Both from Yaya's Cloth (Iris Press, 2007).

 

 

EMERGENCY FAMILY MEETING
                  In memory
I was called to attend, my father
still breathing under the mask after
three weeks, his flesh seized
by a whole body infection.
What I remember now is the perfect
smoothness of my tires on the interstate,
their even sounds of rubber on asphalt
along the ninety-plus miles,
an in-between I could carry
before I’d trace again my steps
along the polished, sterile hallways–
nothing yet decided, no proclamation
issued yet by the doctor, my father still
lying in his present tense
while I sped into the future.

First appeared in One Art