by Anthoula Lelekidis
Local Governance
So it started as a sports club, not a school.
I mean, there was a school with teachers
and cooks and counsellors and shit, but
it was really expensive. After school
the kids got together with the coach
and he taught them how to better play
football and he was good at fishing so
he taught them that too. More kids came
to his classes so he got more people
from his football team in to help coach.
But then the town fired the teachers
at the school and the cooks at the inn
and said hey, coaches—you’re popular—
want a bunch more money to cook
and teach math and English and shit?
And they were like, a lot of money?
I mean, yeah, the townsfolk said. We don’t
have to pay the teachers and the cooks anymore.
You do their jobs and you get most
of their old salary and for a tiny bit of it
we save we get to champion our own efficiency.
So the coaches got to teaching calculus and biology
despite not understanding it at all—they knew
spiraling footballs not double helices. The kids
still went to school, they just didn’t learn.
Stupid ass kids. Not like the now-adults
who understood school taught by teachers
who knew their subjects. Not like the now-adults
who were so damn smart and efficient
that they’d cut the city budget by three percent.
Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Atlanta Review, Meridian, Gone Lawn, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. His short prose chapbook, Between Even Rows of Trees, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Editions.
Anthoula Lelekidis is a first-generation Greek-American lens-based artist who utilizes photography, printmaking, and image transfer in her practice. Her work navigates themes of personal memory, migration, and identity. With a deep interest in the archive, Lelekidis manipulates found family photographs to delve into the complexities of her ancestry, reimagining the blank spaces and uncovering lost connections to her past. Lelekidis holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Parsons School of Design and was awarded a Community Fellowship from the International Center of Photography. She was an artist-in-residence at the Skopelos Foundation of the Arts in Greece and earned a scholarship from the Students On Ice Organization to travel to photograph Antarctica. More recently, she was the recipient of the Manhattan Graphics Center’s printmaking scholarship in 2022 and NYFA’s Queens Art Fund: New Work Grant in 2023. She is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and is based in Queens, New York.
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