Greg Marzullo
Refugee crisis
They ran to their boats,
heaving off the gravelled shore into cold Aegean, where we
flailed, shoved, climbed one another.
Charon would surely reach us first
eyes flashing in the gloom.
Ferocious
they plowed the sea, the waters
cowed by their glare,
calloused hands gripped the oars,
unremitting.
Famished sirens, we
clawed at the hulls
wept into the waves;
they never faltered,
those women hauled their
brethren aboard and
sped back to Lesbos:
Aphrodite’s temple turned
charnel house,
love goddess wreathed with dead laurels.
—For the lesbians without whom we’d all be dead
Greg Marzullo has worked for the Washington Blade and the Phoenix New Times, among other publications. Winner of a Society for Professional Journalists award for arts criticism, he was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Tucson Festival of Books for his poetry.
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