Troilus & Cressida

by Sarah Feng (10)

AK-47. The river banks are stuffed with bullets. On one furrow, metal rings fill the sand. On another, Priam scoops fistfuls of bone into his crown.

The rings are on fingers like fish slicking steel rungs till they aren’t.

The pale bed of her flesh misted over Troilus’s mouth.

We are trying to drink a ghost from the brine & growing angry when it doesn’t show.

His skull won’t hold. The pieces of noise are starting to spill in, spinning the bullet back into the barrel, into back / back the barrel / the antithesis opening its mouth / whole.

I am trying to find the words to tell Cressida that the weight of water won’t hold.

Winner of the 2017 Critical Pass Junior Poet Prize

by Rosaline Qi (12)

This poem is an allusion to the Shakespeare play “Troilus and Cressida,” which tells the story of two disillusioned lovers in the Trojan War. Troilus’s father Priam is the king of Troy.