Better takeout was thriving in DeKalb County,
but the school system hadn’t caught up,
its languages unable to support the Greek bakery,
dim-sum parlors, or lox-and-bagel shops.
We knew the Roman Empire went beyond Italy
and Pizza Hut was not quite Italian,
but we had to distinguish Latin parties
from the French, Spanish, and German.
Latin drew the kids who would opt for Arabic,
Finnish, Japanese, or Navajo, given the chance.
Drawn to difficulty, obliquely pragmatic,
obsessed with vocabulary, liking scansion,
we tripped over the edges of our togas
while vying for certamen-team seats
so as to journey in our teacher’s Toyota
to the state meet in Athens, seventy miles east,
then be routed again by private schools.
Even in defeat, we cherished the knowledge
that others had bothered with Virgil,
aqueducts, the she-wolf sustaining Romulus
and Remus, and the ancestry of words brought
all the way to Georgia: puerile, quadruped,
bellicose, levitate, pacific, Argonaut.
Etymology made our factory garlic bread
more noble, the great-great-grandchild
of a wood-fired oven in a village center.
Pepperoni, curled around lakes of oil,
might have been available at any Kroger,
but if you viewed it as something serious,
you could see all the way to antiquity,
the art of preservation by salt, spice, genius.
Longing to be elsewhere was typically
suburban, but Latin added time travel
and proof that all of us had come from afar.
There were places to go other than the mall,
ways to get there other than your car.
Gods could be petty, oracles flustered,
each mortal destiny anyone’s guess.
Some Atlantans had traveled the world; others
had never seen Rome, seventy miles west.
See more poems from Issue 17.1 by purchasing a copy in our online store. Digital copies only $5.
