Athens 2022
PHRASIKLEIA IS UNEARTHED
She was in the arms of the boy, broken off. They were face to face. They’d been together in the dusty red earth for centuries.
I wonder how they were found. I mean, what sort of probe hit whose body.
I wonder how long one lay out in the sun before being rejoined by the other.
I wonder if they knew each other before they were buried together. I wonder how one becomes acquainted 6 feet under. I wonder if being displayed 6 feet apart is any kind of poetic justice.
How much of her kosmos wilted and joined the dirt beneath the dirt? How much was quietly bleached by the sun? Was her skin maintained? Were the excavation bristles abrasive on her forever stone cheek?
The marble funerary monument to an ancient young woman named Φρασίκλεια / Phrasikleia is found buried with an unknown young man, among potsherds, like bodies.
Merenta / Myrrhinous 1971
A window in the new Acropolis pavement.
Athens 2022
Athens 2022
FRAGMENT 31
A Love Story
The first time I’d read her or even heard of her I was nineteen, a freshman in college. I was given a few old translations of her poems by my history teacher while we studied early Greek writing, but I don’t distinctly remember discussing them. Perhaps they became personal too quickly.
I printed out the scans on the Xerox in the library along with hundreds of other pages of readings for the week. At the time I was intent on consuming every word. I three-hole punched each sheet and carried them around in a massive black plastic binder for discussions.
Late one evening before my interpretation of her was required of me, I sat down at my standard-issue prison-fabricated dormitory desk and read her poetry for the first time. I used Sharpie highlighters on my reading packets, and so I attacked what was left of her words (in English) with a gaudy rainbow of attention. I’m not sure what I was looking for. I don’t think my professor gave much by way of introduction, or I distracted myself to that then-rare word, woman. Looking back at the first Xerox, which I’ve held onto all these years though I am tired of the translation, there is no apparent system, only a map of feeling. Hot pink for longing, safety orange for the erotic, lemon yellow lust and lime for the unbreachable.
What I looked like when I started reading her: tall, not so skinny any more, plastered with the second-lightest drugstore concealer, long hair with short bangs dyed various shades of dark chestnut, turtlenecked, high waisted, Dr. Martens in
dark red with wrinkled patterns worn in from a couple years’ shuffling, the same black liquid cat-eye every day.
When I first read her my splitting auburn hair grazed the pages. She stayed with me. I was head over heels with her fragments. Avoidant, I might have described “it” as her rendering of emotion. I got busy with other things for a while.
The Sappho fragment numbers in this text are based on the Loeb I bought used mid-undergrad, translated by J.M. Edmonds and published in 1922. It does not follow either currently accepted standard treatment.
The first translation of Sappho I read was the Mary Barnard one from the fifties. I believe it is still the most popular, though Anne Carson’s sidles close. I learn in a talk by Kay Gabriel that Barnard went to Reed College in my hometown of Portland and that she studied under the Fascist poet Ezra Pound, who really haunts me, especially when ignored. (No neoclassical exercise is pure). Gabriel writes that Pound’s aesthetics of the fragment has gone on to immensely influence the style of Greek to English translations, piecing up what is in fact more whole.
Eugene 2015
Patricia Cronin’s after a night of rain.
Woodlawn Cemetery 2022
Woodlawn Cemetery 2022
A LITTLE UPHEAVAL
Ropes, thick, like those of a sailing ship, are wound under my asscheeks and tied over my naked lost-groin. They pull me up out of my tomb and bits of old cling to my cracks, sweat, shine, hairs. Metal crane groans and I sway. Won’t you lay me down, stop looking, oh countless men? When I can stand to look down from my suspension over one shoulder without the nausia coming back, I see she’s lain out on wood panels below me, deader, deadening. Lips are sealed.
An shows the unnamed boy lifted by crane, surrounded by laborers at noon.
Merenta / Myrrhinous 1971
The Garland
Draft One
Photographs, writing, design © Hyacinth Schukis 2022
The Garland is an archaeological love story / a story about falling in love with archaeology.
It weaves together prose fragments of an education in Ancient Greek culture, a lesbian infatuation with , and a few years of gender-fuckery. Within are meditations on long teen-girlhood, joining the Sappho fandom, t4t love and anti-memoir transition, burial and unburial, queer museum visits, study-abroad heartbreak, products from your local mall, purloined favorite textbook pages, and plenty of Mediterranean sunsets.
Literary Memoir / Hybrid Genre
Paperback, first edition of 50
126pp, Black and white, with illustrations
5.25x8”
Printed and bound by Fireball Press in Philadelphia
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro, Fakir Display Pro, and Garamond/t
Read Zoe Tuck’s review here!