Venus At the Little Acropolis
Under the plastic acanthus and laurel
swagging in grandmotherly curves
from the acoustic tiles,
in the hypothermic mood lighting
bluing the corrugated columns
and marblesque tabletops,
the combo strikes up Nisiótika
and the expat Kikladic-islanders grow misty-eyed
over their wine, hummus, and oktopadi.
This is the just warm-up act
under the Parthenon prints from Roma,
and the Venus De Milo wistful
that she could never again maneuver
tsatsiki into that pouty mouth.
Most of those not Greek here would tell you
they are Lebanese, politic at the current
Middle Eastern fraught moment,
but the table in the corner are riotously Egyptian
fêting Teta's eightieth birthday,
the nephews perspiring and the uncles
reminiscing about Oum Kalthoum
though this is Joan Baez country,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, where imports from everywhere
wash up comfortably cosmopolitan.
And now the star attraction over the baklava:
Fatima the belly dancer who can shiver
the gemmed scimitar across her abs
hands-free (a trick Venus is watching closely).
She arches and shakes her mile of glossy mane back
and the men mop their foreheads with their hankies
as she shimmers across the floor in rubied sandals.
She bows and they sprint up to tuck big bills
into her bedleh just slowly enough for lust
and quickly enough for family propriety,
and then it is our turn to dance. The bouzouki
jangles. The bodies shimmy and swirl
until Jadd rises and clears his throat and the dancefloor,
makes a toast and friends and strangers cheer.
Then the rhythm shifts, the tune is Leylet Hob —
Night of Love — and Teta rises the way a volcano presses from the sea,
shakes out her black skirts of ancient loss and her own
hip-scarf wine-dark as the Aegean or the Nile
and begins an undulation from her core
as though the earth were rearranging herself
or the tide rolling up the estuary.
No one breathes. No one has moves like Teta,
who has fled across borders with babies on her hips,
made do, made love, mourned sons, built businesses,
and planted herself here in the city like a monument,
but step-turns like Isis fresh from the lotus-gardens,
and Jadd flushes and flashes his teeth like a bridegroom
and we are all fallen in love again at the wedding of the world.
© 2025 Jennifer M Phillips
Jennifer M Phillips came across borders early in life and is now a bi-national lifelong poet
living on Cape Cod, grateful for this Wampanoag ancestral territory. Phillips' work has appeared in over 100 journals and 2 chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), with a 3rd, Sailing To the Edges (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.) Her collection is Wrestling with the Angel, (Wipf and Stock Pub., 2025) Phillips has had two poems nominated Pushcart Prize.
