Eleni Sikelianos’s ‘Human Mornings’
A new poem by Eleni Sikelianos from the LARB Quarterly, no 49: ‘Traffic.’
By Eleni Sikelianos August 11, 2026
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This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 49: Traffic. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.
¤
Human Mornings
It was a human morning in New York
but was it a human morning in L.A.?
Yes, yes. It was a Monday
in my opinion. All the homemade
legs of love laid out in the dark stretching
love’s toes. It was a human hour
at dawn and a human hour in Mombasa,
the minerals absorbed then abandoned the minute, so full of human
s loving them all. The evening closed
humanly, humanly the night
and its breathing stars opened, human thought clattered in high air.
I felt possible, full of time, I watched all the human Tuesdays fold
their nightclothes, Wednesdays stacked up weightless against the wall.
Do we wear nightclothes here?
Do we wear grief? All the rumpled human
feelings drifting
infinitely down in sediment
to earth’s core
while all the other animals’ sounds rose.
Please open up your face. I’ve been dying to see you here.
¤
Featured image: Keystone View Company. Up Broadway and Fifth Avenue from Flat Iron Building, New York, NY, USA, 1905. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. tepapa.govt.nz, CC0. Accessed August 4, 2026. Image has been cropped.
LARB Contributor
Eleni Sikelianos was born into a family of bohemians, poets, tree workers, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and small-time sort-of hustlers. She is a poet, writer, collaborator, and mixer of genres. She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Goleta, California, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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