“Live from the 054 bus in Athens” and “Violanta Biscuit Factory Blast”
Live from the 054 bus in Athens
I haven’t arrived yet.
I write to you —
yes, you —
live from the 054 Athens bus,
passing by Polytechneio or
the Athens Polytechnic uni.
Acropolis is hiemally hanging
from nimbostratus clouds
looking down at us so humanly.
Polytechneion here, Polytechneion here:
gatecrash — rape — 1973,
bloodshed — bulleted — steeled,
Bread — Education — Liberty.
The cold city marks an anniversary
redolent
of a coldblooded mass murder
of students:
tear gas — ammunition — flesh.
Athens is winter inhuming her apparitions:
to survive her own warmthfugal whiteout,
to suppress the perps’ rep like pistol silencer,
to shroud the perspicacity of crystals.
Now I’m on this lethal street
not moving.
To choose to walk away from this is a mistake,
don’t mistake me,
I mean exactly what I say
and stay,
next to me old king Cecrops
sitting on the bus stop bench,
his tail comfortably coiled around my leg —
myself Collieresque in Lilith —
telling every passerby willing to listen:
“Cecropia does not allow bloody sacrifices.”
Patission Street, 17 November 2025
Violanta Biscuit Factory Blast
Very well then, let this body be ordained to propane
in this sacrificial ordination of women — a wave train
on fire, a blind night on the iris, the gaslighting on the nose —
let this body drown and drain, let me blaze and immolate myself
as one, the only body of Greece, the poem of all,
not just of five women who smelled gas for days in a factory in
Trikala. Eyes of black soot, hours of no time: earth erases what I say:
Anastasia — Stavroula — Eleni — Vaso — Agapi.
This acrostic was written in response to the grief and anger for the deadly blast at the Violanta biscuit factory in Trikala, Greece, in the early hours of Monday, January 26, 2026, killing five employees—all women—due to a leak of propane, and it sheds light on the working conditions faced by workers as well as the chronic ills and weaknesses of labour inspectorate understaffing—a legacy of Greece’s decade-long debt crisis.
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 The Wisconsin Review, Tint Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Magma Poetry, The Coachella Review, So to Speak, and elsewhere.
