Having Not Heard the Sound of My Voice by Tiffany Kang

i suppose i am seeing the world.

i suppose this makes me worldly.

really, it’s just confusing.

i wonder what the proper reaction should be
to a week of Grecian sunsets,
a lap around the Acropolis,
the panic of searching for public toilets
and a hotel room for two,

though it’s really just me
in a really big bed,

wrestling the contradiction
between grief for history lost
and praise for history preserved.

facing six ocean shores
in the span of three weeks,
am i to feel small, sad, or human?

my gut tells me to take a photograph. pocket a seashell.
pluck a daffodil ten feet from the remaining corner
of Apollo’s Temple. fossilize petals between pages
of my travel journal.

toss the stem
to which the gods will attend

and go back.

go back
human

as one

to a hotel room for two. 

Tiffany Kang is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Creative Writing program and its premier performance poetry collective, The Excelano Project. She now works as a journalist for a hunger relief non-profit in Oakland, California. Her work has been published in Van Gogh's Ear for Music and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review.