House Lions is Wesleyan’s resident poetry podcast. To hear fresh featured poets read their poems live and talk about their work check out the House Lions weekly featured reader. Look for information about live recording sessions in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and a new featured poet every week.  For more information, or to express interest in being on the show, shoot an email to sknittle@wesleyan.edu.

This week’s poet: Mollie McFee

Mollie McFee was born in Atlanta, GA to a family that loved literature. As a child, she would get mad at her mother for asking difficult questions about the children’s stories they read together. Her first poetic memory is of memorizing the verses to her grandmother’s favorite hymn, “For the Beauty of the Earth.”

Mollie began writing poetry through class exercises as a fourth grader. In high school, she worked on and was published in her school’s literary magazine.

Mollie is a member of Wesleyan’s class of 2010, and a double major in the College of Letters and French Studies. Her current projects include working with the Pedestrian Collective and writing a short collection of poems to be released by Stethoscope Press in the Spring of 2010.

Half-Life of Two Violences

Shopping carts rattling over cobblestones

Sounds nothing like your name,

But I hear it whispered to every mouth I fill,

Fitting in crevices between lentils,

Sour like apricot stew.

The toothless man has

A small hand tattooed on his wrist

And straight scars like stripes up his arms;

He tells me

About his brother,

“Il était un beau gosse.”

I can only hear

Kabylie, 1960

Waking every night and day to

Hunger,

And cigarettes on arms.

If one bullet can break a body

Then seven will pop dreams like balloons.

In my sleep I have already died three times,

In my waking mind, more.

“America,”

he sings,

he thinks he is anointing me,

Pouring idyllic over our greifs.

However,

Every step,

What if

What if she

What if she hadn’t.

Full interview:
[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/molliefull.mp3″]

Orient:
[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/orient.mp3″]

Halflife of Two Violences:
[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/foodnotbombs.mp3″]

Ars Poetica:
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