“Is it worse to be someplace awful when you’re by yourself,
or someplace really nice that you can’t share with anyone?”
This is where Theseus ditched Ariadne.
Jump-cut to sweating slabs of feta, to squids
dangling on clotheslines. His lanky frame in
bleached-out blue jeans
practically draining into the horizon.
Rakı going milky in a tall glass of
melting ice. In one version of the story
Ariadne marries
Dionysus—her wine-dark loneliness lit
up with a single sip. Olives green as eyes,
dry bougainvillea flowers like fingernails
over cobblestones.
Others say that no one ever came and she
hung herself. Cue the tomatoes, a gliding
knife: golden hour gilding the scene as Tony
shakes oil from a glass
bottle, preparing a feast as if someone
else might enter the frame. As if it doesn’t
end with him eating alone on a terrace
staring out to sea.
Gregory Emilio is a poet and food writer from southern California. He is the author of the poetry collection Kitchen Apocrypha (Able Muse, 2023), and his poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, North American Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. He earned an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Georgia State University. A mean home cook and avid cyclist, he lives in Atlanta and teaches at Kennesaw State University.
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