And what they called natural in antiquity they call undone in this new city. We progress in technology and regress in knowledge. We swap children for morals and toys for defense. I ask you if you sent that picture of Jesus to your mother. I told you I would tell you more about how I wish I could be allowed to love your parents. So I send you the picture to send to her. Tell her I was thinking of her in Oxford in an abandoned church she thinks I don’t belong. I was thinking of her while she was begging you to not think of me. Tell her I was thinking of this book she might like to read. The perspective of a deacon. A perspective she understands. I think she’d like my grandfather. I think she’d hate my grandfather. He was a deacon but he was a deacon who had me as a grandchild. My grandma says he would have loved me. He would have accepted me. Because there’s a difference. Your mother loves you. But she does not accept you. So you do not tell her about the picture. You do not tell her about the book. Because you ask, “who would I tell her it’s from?”

27 May 2025
Athens, Greece

We walked along The Plaka and laughed at its shape.
We called it The Strip and toed the line
between comfort in strangers and flattery for euros.
We exchanged our gyros for gelato and
talked about how sweet it is to listen
to casual music and debate about directions
we never used. We walked by our senses
and our senses took us here. When the Greeks
walked this path they had rituals in mind
and we have questions that professors don’t always
know the answers to. But we ask them anyways
like whether the Greeks were homosexual or
Homosocial. We debate the spectrum of desire
and fall in love with chocolate that tastes like raspberries.

28 May 2025
Athens, Greece

The lies we tell ourselves like that
an eye for an eye will not rot in my foot
and crawl out my lungs infested with cordyceps.

I plunge into the sea they crossed
to bring Helen back I think of punishment
I think of my ears drowning

trying to outrun consequences and questions
and context. If we live in the water
can gravity touch us? if we are wet can we

be land and if we are human can we be mortal
enough to be moral can we know the difference
or do we live in impatience of death and choose immorality instead?

29 May 2025
Athens, Greece

We ride on the bus to Delphi
and I get nauseous at the thought
of approaching silence.
We follow the path of Orestes
and in the quiet I hear panic I hear
Furies. I throw up in my bag of popcorn
And look down at my shoes punished
from looking at the mountains but still
I grow small I grow small I grow
down. We approach the 2 streets
the only ones around
and I start to see you around–
in the dog barking,
in the sun because
we don’t have lizards here.
I read stories you already know
from your class this semester,
you whisper the answers to prove to me
you know as I stay up until midnight
just to say goodnight just to hear your voice.

31 May 2025
Delphi, Greece

Charlotte is laying on top of the mountain,
her curls wrapped around the cypress trees.
When she is restless, her arms leave imprints
In the paths we follow. We are on the ground and
we walk the path to the oracle and Penny tells us why.

Apollo ran to Daphne and she turned into the laurel
we brush skin with now. She warns of us gods loved
too long. We pass and take candid photos,
Emma wants to flash the mountains and Tori
says if it’s not a photo op I don’t wanna go so
we look with half our bodies and take pictures
Of half preserved ruins. Gaia breathes beneath us
and Ava laughs about getting high
up in the mountain and we talk about Greek
life next to the stadium. We are opposed.

We talk about the chapters, not the culture.
Making hand signs when the Greeks used
their hands to build columns and carve friezes.
We talk about the statues they built as
they worshipped their stories and hugged
them as the answers to the questions they feared asking.

They made Ares out of shame and Athena out of doubt.
Now we are screaming next to students who
don’t speak the same language but know
what we mean. They see greed and stupidity.
They see Americans. Like we see in myths,
they see stereotypes. Or maybe they just see girls,
girls who just hiked a mountain and want to relax.

But is that what the ruins hear?
Do they laugh or scowl?
Do they cry when we sit on rocks?
Do they cry because we can’t hear them
over our stories that just haven’t become myths yet.

1 June 2025
Delphi, Greece

I’m pacing back and forth
on the beach with people I don’t
know talking about people
I do know. We’re falling more
Into understanding. We’re falling more
into friendship and when we lay
on the beach we catch
each other’s eyes in a conspiratorial eye.

When we lay on the beach,
we lay on the beach
and can’t believe we’re laying
On a beach. This morning
we were on a boat and complained
more than we should have.
With every wave we heard Odysseus

on the shore and snuffed it out
with smoke that puffs out
again on the beach.
We put it down for salt
water through our hands
and rocks on bones we rediscover

In ourselves with our bone
against bone we want
To know each other once
We realize the mortality
Of this trip we think

and we’re back on land
looking at Penelope with her
lonely weaving hands
calling us home.

4 June 2025
Xania, Greece

My mom asks me whether
I will take a Mediterranean diet
back home with me.
I tell her I stuffed baguettes
with feta cheese in the middle
in my pockets and I’m still thinking
about the rest. In the morning

we enter the tunnels from the holocaust,
the places where German soldiers
hid their armory and
a frat boy hits his vape
puffing out strawberry in the mildew air.
I wonder if he will take shame
back with him or just the vape,
just the wine he buys at the end

of the wine tasting we visit
briefly after. And while we drink
I think about innocence,
I think about sappho and her virginity
lost. Her love lost
In the fragments she wrote.
We call them fragments because we lost
her poems. We don’t know how

to love women. We lose
any time we try. We sip
red wine and talk about
science. But we’re really talking
about love. We talk about
what we miss. But it’s the wine
we will take home.

5 June 2026
Xania, Greece

I stick out my tongue waiting for the sun to rain sunlight
drops that hit my tongue and burn my throat all the way down.

I throw up starlight and everyone crowds around me
because I throw up starlight because everyone crowds around me.

The waves are getting choppy and the boats are getting tedious
we walk into the ruins and for the first time I feel a home.

The world goes silent and I belong to dust
where the palaces and temples have felt like they belong.

To nature and Gaia, these ruins of a town are enclosed
it only belongs to itself and itself belongs to.

It hides in this factory and I have an acute sense of disturbing
the rocks that lie in the ground that are delicately brushed away

to reveal windows carefully constructed by people who didn’t have
a name for what they were making but rather a demand.

I think about this place and find myself making space
for another era in my world and I feel smaller.

9 June 2025
Santorini, Greece

I’m on the phone with my lover
swaying on a boat
in the middle of the sea.

They are playing French music
behind me and you’re telling me
you love me for each hour you sleep.

And I smile because you’re with me.
I’ve been closing my eyes and counting the sounds
and finally yours is with the chorus.

10 June 2025
Santorini, Greece

We’ve shirked our travel skins
and complained in desperation
to go home. We will always be impatient
and when delays get in the way

all our filters have gone away.
All the defenses we held up so strong
blast away in the presence of strong winds
that are meant to take us home.

We rush to wait for baggage
just for the promise of departure.
We leave the ruins behind, sand in the cracks
of our shoes but we are anxious for the future.
We run to cars driven by lovers and never look back.

14 June 2025
Newark Airport, NJ