BRISEIS

by Gail White

Apulian Red-Figure Amphora by the Painter of the Berlin Dancing Girl ca. 430-410 BCE depicting Achilles and Briseis. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Women have few speaking parts

in the Iliad. At the beginning,

Briseis is torn away from Achilles

with never a word. But when Agamemnon

finally decides to make up the quarrel

and sends her back, Patroclus is dead

and her grief is for him, the most decent man

in the crowd, and the kindest.

You would not let me grieve, she says,

when Achilles had killed my father and brothers

and taken me captive; you always promised

Achilles would marry me.

That's what the women

have to look forward to in wartime:

with any luck, the man who murdered

your brothers will marry you. Although Achilles

did no such thing. Most likely he shunted

her off to the loom and kept her weaving

new tunics for him while he sent letters

over the wall to young Polyxena,

the bait that would lead him to his death.

Soldiers die, and the race of heroes

is gone: today there is no Achilles,

Patroclus, or angry Agamemnon.

But look at the eyes of captured women:

Briseis is there, forever dragged

away, forever and ever silent.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

TILIKUM

by Bayleigh Fraser

I’m sorry, I thought you smiled at me
when your mouth caved open for fish,

teeth gleaming hooks, I thought you splashed
my body because you saw parched lips

with pearly onyx eyes, that you understood
how I, riddled with Florida sun, could not have

what you did, cold, water which was endless
to my child self idolizing the girls in wetsuits

and ponytails riding your back, you looking
blanket soft beneath their hands. I thought

that was love. Maybe it was. I’m sorry
I loved a man who made me feel captive,

like a second skin, who wanted my hands,
my messy apartment, me gaunt-faced, his music

tortured from the television speakers, but then,
I was stroking his silky hair and having his baby,

coming back to him, and you were thrashing
for a way out. I’m sorry for returning to your spectacle.

That you sliced open the pool and bent
into the sun. That your body barrelled with gravity.

The last time I watched you—you still shiny
as a strip of old film, a fresh spill—I fought

with my sister. Blaming the heat, how
it buoyed our tempers. The two of us

huddled in the back of stadium bleachers,
our one handheld fan like a wish we couldn’t decide on.

I’m sorry we forgot your pain. One sweat-baked face
shoving another for the slightest draft, hands and curse words

scraping for a chance to hold the new video camera.
We were stormy voices. Confined bodies.

A breath away from the other’s throat, what no one
could have mistaken for love, but was all we knew.

Bayleigh Fraser is an American poet currently residing and writing in Canada, where she hopes to continue her education in poetry. She previously studied at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 3Elements Review, A Bad Penny Review, The Brooklyn Quarterly, One, Qu, Rattle, and other publications.