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: rose red

She never wanted the troll,

though, when freeing his beard
trapped in the bill of a circling bird,
when sliding her scissors through the soft
hairs at the nub of his chin, she did
think the shadow dropping from the gull's
wings lent his face a certain ugly interest.

She never wanted the prince's brother,

second prize to the elder, but just as vain,
with a woman's soft hips and hands,
surrounding himself with mirrors and liking
her sister better anyway, her indiscriminate
sweetness: an ordinary fruit ripening
in a bowl displayed on a public table.

And she did not want the bear

their mother invited next to the fire,
though his stinking fur could make
her eyes and mouth water. Once, she devised
a way to lie beside him, innocently
at first, then not so, curled behind him,
running her thumbnail down his spine.

What she wanted, of course, was her own place in the forest,

where she would take the flowering trees
that grew outside her mother's bedroom window -
one white, buxom with albino blossoms,

one red, smaller, with delicate, hooked thorns -
and plant them on opposite sides of her cottage,
watching each bloom fall as summer spoiled them.

- Erin Belieu, "Rose Red"

poetry: “Names You Can’t Pronounce”

I
Another summer in a town you know
like the backs of your knees and just
as sweaty. Nights aren’t much cooler.

Sometimes, when you walk out late to think
or just stare at your hands swinging
next to you, the green smells

of the Russian olive surrounding
the synagogue push at the back of your throat. Too big a mouthful,

so you stare at your hands which are
swinging soft and pale at the end
of your wrists and listen to cicadas
chorus their unknown tragedy.

II

You have two lovers. One knows you best
but his hands are soft, pale, female
like your own. The other tastes the back

of your knees, but won’t make love
to you. You stare at his knuckles
when he works, square and browned

from summer jobs. With the first
you take long walks past the synagogue
to a park with a war memorial.

The names there are thin, tragedy
chipped into black marble: Cassavettes,
Beacom, a Russian name you can’t pronounce,
all of these men, to you, unknown.

III

You can see the synagogue from
the window of your bedroom, wake
to the sign: FREEDOM FOR SOVIET JEWS.

The women downstairs have made love
and now they fight. It’s a tragedy,
they were friends before

they were lovers. The man living in
the basement is old, a veteran. Says
he hates Krauts, likes Russians.

The summer mornings are soft and pale
and when you wake from sleep
your hands flutter against the sheet;
the backs of your knees ache.

- Erin Belieu, "Names You Can't Pronounce"

poetry: false starts?

The ripped girl gathers herself,
draws into the recess of a downtown
highrise, then cries as if alone into
the body of an indifferent building.

The black feathers of her party dress
forsake her, dead flutter falling round
her arms. Having flown through many autumns,
in other clear, martini dusks, their circles

kept growing smaller till they settled
at nothing, save decoration. Now currents
are senseless and wild, still sweeping warm
across the public ponds, just wind.

Around the corner a man in a tuxedo looks
bored, always waiting. She's borrowed
his handkerchief. Profile of the Napoleonic
sphinx, yes. Yet something struggles

beneath the dial of his face. He craves
the crowd, its wandering breach and flow,
hears a genuine laugh bob up and wants
to follow it home, all the way through

the city, to any lit place beyond him. Night
is pending. Its tributaries flow, spilling
fast onto the sidewalk; something wet and plumed
to catch him. Like feathers raining. Like wings.

- Erin Belieu, "Outside the Hotel Ritz"

on living underneath and being so small (erin belieu)

He lived in a sod house,
a formal nest of grass
that wove green thread
around his soul, a bed
of mud and cellulose.

And she was small. She
never grew; the empty
wind that blew and reared
had bent her to the plains she cared
so little for. But he,

he didn't seem to mind
her size, he'd found
a shape to love there;
and she was spare where
he was generous as sand, the kind

of man who drifted
like the yellow hills that lifted
their sloping shoulders to the bad
lands. For her his mud
heart tumbled like the tufted
weeds that wheel along the plains,
that sea of mammoth bones,
that state all made of sky—
they married in July.
Her thin bouquet of corn

flowers remains the brightest thing
he'd ever see. I have her ring
now, a silver band so little
it won't budge over the knuckle
on my pinky. How long

ago, a man gave his grass
soul to her in her brown dress—
and she was always stern,
too small, and learned
to keep inside a sod house.

- "Plainsong," Erin Belieu

prose poetry: making a scene (erin belieu)

Part of the Effect of the Public
Scene Is to Importune the
Passing Viewer
FOR EXAMPLE:
walking past the Ritz a girl may be sitting on the last step crying
as if alone and you notice, even in this cocktail-hour light, the
little rips and shreds of her chapped lips and that she has no
Kleenex and no one stops to offer one and you feel damned if you
do or don't, not wanting to intrude, as a man is standing maybe
only three feet away, his profile approximating a little shame,
some discomfort, but mostly a sphinx-like composure, or
boredom, perhaps, indicating they are together, together in that
way you're not completely sure you'll ever want to know about
again and you're ashamed, too, with nothing to offer but to gaze
intently at the fascinating street lamp as you walk by.

PROBABLY YOU'VE CAUSED A SCENE YOURSELF:
public or private, at a bar or in a strange apartment, when
suddenly you became conscious of the drama, of the real pleasure
in your tears, the catharsis of the wail and rage, the screams, the
"trashing of the joint," because that's what's next, snipping up
his Liberty of London ties, ripping off her nightgown, pushing
her out naked on the patio for the neighbors' judgment who are
there, to be sure, either by accident or rubbernecked design,
keeping score or scared for their own property. Or instead you've
been the impetus, unfaithful, deceitful, maybe only the hapless
object of some other person's desire thinking that, for all their
protestations of love, you might as well be a bathroom fixture or
bookend. in either case.

IT'S HARD TO MAKE A GRACEFUL EXIT:
as all scenes peter out in awkward ways. Someone's left thinking
of the perfect remark, a remark that'll sink like an ax blade, the
kind that are never on hand when needed, so that you end up
shouting, spluttering Oh yeah?! Oh yeah?! Oh Yeah?! like a moron,
like a damn fool, crying on the last step, in front of strangers,
without a Kleenex.

- "Part of the Effect of the Public Scene Is to Importune the Passing Viewer" by Erin Belieu