Two Movie Poems
Poetry by:
CATHERINE BRESNER
The Unbelievable Truth
Hal Hartley, 1989, 90 mins
Audrey is alternately bored and terrified.
Audrey is alternately bored and terrified and her boyfriend disgusts her.
Audrey is in love with a man who just got out of prison for a double murder.
Audrey knows that we, as a human species, are close to fucking everything up with our bombs. She’s going to Harvard, maybe. Probably.
Audrey who is played by Adrienne Shelly has strawberry red hair and a pink mouth. Everyone wants to kiss it. Audrey is a flirt.
Adrienne Shelly who is not Audrey who is actually Adrienne Levine was an actress, director, and screenwriter and optimistic agnostic.
Adrienne Shelly committed suicide in her Greenwich Village studio on November 1, 2006.
Adrienne Shelly didn’t commit suicide, she was murdered in her New York studio on November 1, 2006, and it was made to look like a suicide.
Law & Order Episode 386 is a thinly veiled dramatization of Adrienne Shelly’s murder.
In Law & Order Episode 227, Adrienne Shelly plays Wendy, a former porn star who ends up going to jail for conspiracy to murder.
Adrienne Shelly’s directorial debut was for Waitress in 2007, starring Kerri Russell, and received a “90% Fresh” rating, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
Badlands
Terrence Malick, 1973, 95 mins
in one scene we are escaping from our daddies with their thick necks and long guns and curfews, we are on the soft soft lamb baby
in another the cows screaming in the feedlot, in another a dead catfish thrown into the vegetable garden, in another a felled tree in a brown riverbank
we're Sissy in her white short shorts and Martin in his cowboy boots and denim, we are all american apparel circa nineteen fifties in a town called Texas
in the days of happiness, a red balloon rose over the farm grasses into the strategic sky, higher and higher away from sharp rooftops
the imaginary felt more actual than the actual, we were kings and queens of grasshoppers, we gave names to all of the flowers we didn't already know
it was the time of quiet in the cathedral of the trees and we humped each other in hushed voices and stared at the soft clouds on our hard backs
we were killers and we burned for each other, everything existed to be touched
we rang the bell, didn't we didn’t we didn’t we didn’t
Follow Catherine:
Instagram: @catherineb817
Bio:
Catherine Bresner is the author of the chapbook The Merriam Webster Series; the artist book Everyday Eros (Mount Analogue 2017); and the empty season, which won the Diode Edition Book Prize in 2017. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the VOLTA, b l u s h, Sixth Finch, Fonograf, Itinerant, The Offing, Heavy Feather Review, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Paperbag and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Juniper Summer Institute fellowship and the 2019 Cadence Residency through the Northwest Film Forum. Currently, she is the publicist for Wave Books and lives in Brattleboro, VT.More From This Issue...
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
EST 2020
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© THE QUARTERLESS REVIEW ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
EST 2020
︎
© THE QUARTERLESS REVIEW ALL RIGHTS RESERVED