By Elizabeth Higgins
I.
Seventh grade humanities class. Ancient Greece.
Each table group is a city-state. Each teacher is a god.
I sit in the southeast corner of Corinth.
Our teacher stands in front of the class and tells us she is Aphrodite.
There’s snickering because the idea is absurd,
the comedic formula familiar: fat woman
thinks she’s a goddess.
We search her eyes for irony, for apology,
but there isn’t any. My laminate desk
reflects fluorescence.
I stare down at it, glare shifting with my pulse
as I try to tuck my second chin into my chest,
to fold in on myself, to stop my face from burning
which always makes it worse
and after twenty years of letting this memory
gather enough dust to dim a light bulb
I saw a drawing of Aphrodite
that did not look like Aphrodite to me
and I didn’t know why
and the dust plumed when it hit me.
II.
I’ve never been much for mythology, but what if I told you that
Aphrodite is abundant. Aphrodite ripples like the ocean she came from.
Envelops. Lifts. Shapeshifts. Pounds the shore until its rocks are exposed
and gleaming.
That sometimes her energy is forced into the sea floor
and her people have to suffer facsimiles.
That even in dormancy, she can reach into the future and arouse
my attention with a warm balm of rose and myrrh.
Elizabeth Higgins writes across genres and disciplines to consolidate information and experience through archival research, confronting the past and reframing the present. Elizabeth is an academic coach and former library cataloger with an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University Cascades, whose work can be found or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Trace Fossils Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Footnote: A Literary Journal of History. Elizabeth’s hybrid project Unfit to be at Large: Fragments from the Life of Helen Fischer received the 2024 Work-in-Progress prize from Unleash Press.