Aeolou Street

By Athena Melliar

Aeolou is a street leading to the Acropolis of Athens.

Aeolou is a road to the Athenian citadel, like a safe harbourage offering to a stranger looking rather familiar — Τίνος είσαι εσύ;

Aeolou is a one-way ride for meters and merles.

Aeolou is a hide of unlived lives with their mutterings running before the wind and at anchor.

Aeolou has her warning signs disguised as speed limit signs not unlike a ship flying no courtesy flag in a nation’s territorial sea.

Aeolou is the realisation hitting a generation after decades of financial crash.

Aeolou is how all my dreams grow gusts and then shields.

Aeolou is my home confinement though not a prison.

Aeolou used to reign over the actual winds, now it micromanages tourists as an attraction.

Aeolou lords it over its anaphoric expressions, while anaphora thinks both of them have reasons to pity themselves.

Aeolou has always been an in-between like an airport, a stairway, an affair, or a chair not allowing you to sit.

Aeolou is the last wind to Eridanus, the river of everything buried.

Aeolou feels strong and personal: it’s gulping down my sobs.

Aeolou leaves a salty taste in my mouth.

Aeolou sees me to the sea though the lying-in Kerameikos cemetery.

Aeolou smells the way iodine scents the morning flow I bathe in naked and alone.

Aeolou is burying me in water, water charges into my body.

Aeolou is emptying me of my waters like an aqueduct, like a tear duct.

Aeolou chooses to ignore my voice and hears it.

Aeolou is no promised land, Aeolou lands me no land — an unemployed symploce felt the need to chime in.

Aeolou is my island queendom that doesn’t exist.

Aeolou lives in what-if time in uncharted waters like an orphic necropolis.

Aeolou is a phantom limb I rub with numbing cream.

Aeolou is rough sea.

Aeolou is a swim.

Limb, sea, swim — I try for years in my dreams to swim this sky, I wake up and it gets deeper, it floods a city inside me.

*Τίνος είσαι εσύ; (Greek meaning “Whose are you?”), a question often asked among Greeks to determine who one’s parents are and to which family line one belongs.

Athena Melliar is a Greek feminist poet and essayist who lives and writes in Athens. Athena is a philologist specialising in educational and developmental psychology. Her work has appeared in Tint Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Magma Poetry, The Argyle, Occulum, petrichor, Flyway, Harpy Hybrid Review, The Coachella Review, So to Speak, and elsewhere.