poetry: Melissa Kirsch - King Lear Considers What He's Wrought

Everyone worships the daughters,
skirts the shade of cake frostings, Teflon
idolettes, pedicured, hemophiliac
overpretties, laughing on the inside.

The boys are corn-fed and prep-schooled,
mirror-stuck, the milksops! Woe
unto the boldest of them, for who-so-
ever shall venture to pen a verse
for a Lear girl's hand let him

wither, unaided, in locker rooms,
let him be caught with his hand down his trousers.

The king is aware that parenting is a loose science,
performed by foglight, and so forgives himself.
He too was barely tended to, was made and then undone.

Who's Lear's daddy? He was a bastard, a salty dog.

Dear Cordelia. The boys would still like to press
a peony behind her ear, pack up her petticoats,
and take her away to somewhere-upon-somewhere.

Even penniless, there's something so irresistible
about a girl with nothing to prove.

- Melissa Kirsch - King Lear Considers What He's Wrought

poetry: Two Weeks On The Island by Erin Belieu

You're angry that I can't love the ocean, but

I came to the world land-locked and some bodies
are permanently strange. Like languages,
if you study them too late, they'll never stick.

Anyway, we're here, aren't we?—
trudging up the sand, the water churning
its constant horny noise, an open-mouthed heavy

breathing made more unnerving
by the presence of all these families, the toddlers

with their chapped bottoms, the fathers
in gigantic trunks spreading out their dopey
circus-colored gear.

How can anyone relax
near something so worked up all the time?

I know the ocean is glamorous,
but the hypnosis, the dilated narcotic pull of it,
feels impossible to resist. And what better

reason to resist? I'm most comfortable in a field,
a yellow-eared patch of cereal, whose quiet

rustling argues only for the underrated
valor of discretion. And above this, I admire
a certain quality of sky, like an older woman

who wears her jewels with an air of distance, that is
lightly, with the right attitude.

Unlike the ocean, there's nothing sneaky about
a field. I like its ugly-girl frankness. I like that,
sitting in the dirt, I can hear what's moving

between the stalks.

- Erin Belieu - Two Weeks On The Island

poetry: subtitled by Marie Lecrivain

When I am with you,
I feel like we are in a subtitled movie
driving down a remote European highway
in a Ferrari,
or maybe
in something small, deadly and German.

The shape of your mouth is not
rounding in synch
with the sounds of your emotions.
"A" is "W,"
or sometimes "Y."
"U" comes out as
two "K's" and a silent "B."
My smile
foreshadows an
an international
assassination plot,
and our kiss is the signal
for hordes of Mongols to
leave the hills
shop haute couture in Paris.

The confusion
is charming,
but still confusing.

What are we saying?

What I am saying?

I know
when I take the gun
from the hands of the dead fashionista,
and shoot you in the left eye,

when I spit on your favorite.
picture of your last stepmother.

when I count backward from ten,
in decimal points.

Do you know what I am saying?

The words are at the bottom of the screen in
dirty, yellow print,
but no one is paying attention.
The audience is too busy trying not to
grab each other's hands in the popcorn bucket,
fearful of falling in love.

Marie Lecrivain - Subtitled