ann pedone / poem

from: Parthenon

I’d flown to JFK and then 

Rome and then Athens when 

I got to the airport I went to the 

bathroom pulled up a photo on

my phone of two goats fucking in 

Greek Αιγαίο the Aegean can 

easily be mistaken for αίγα 

meaning goat a long narrow 

median of grass surrounded by 

concrete you came up behind 

me as if ode were nothing but

pure memory but what does it 

restore yes I catch myself your 

hands flush my genitals not unlike 

the bees we saw they were 

trying desperately to make sense of

the pile of salt someone had left by 

the front door of your mother’s house

The blameless 

media lingua in the 

museum basement where 

someone had 

dismantled the dream

I had last 

night I was lost in a 

brightly lit 

arcade an aviary made 

of pink stone and 

glass Hellenic memory

curved by the 

weight of bleached 

octopus a girl in a red-

checked skirt who 

leads me to the exit 

transmission fluid-

stained grass I’m half-

exposed on a mattress 

filled with aluminum more 

then half a century ago

---

Ann Pedone's books include The Medea Notebooks, The Italian Professor’s Wife, and The Best Kind of Love, forthcoming from If a Leaf Falls Press. Her poetry, non-fiction, and reviews have been published widely. Ann is the founder and editor-in-chief of antiphony: a journal & small press.