[king hunt 5.1]

Natalie Tombasco

full fathom five sycorax lies; mudded, bedded in the kelp forest’s quiet

with pincers, sorting through regnal names. her island is a fitting laboratory,

a terraqueous host—ungovernable, unbottled—hasn’t she given enough?

(sea-change, a false storm) she speaks strangely with forked language as cold

nymphs haul the king in fishnets within her grotto, utterly gorgonesque:

stalactites, travertine, pumice, gemstones. envy of the east india company.

this is where she learned of defense mechanisms, to be both hard and soft

as a scallop clung to umbo. isn’t there something beautiful about being two-

bodied and hinged? (enter king, fetching logs for the fire) the blue-eyed hag 

sits upon a nacre shell, wearing a crown of bleached coral and surrounded by

cornucopias of conch, oysters, snails, but still unsatisfied with this once

vermillion kingdom. how does one witch stop the conquest and pillage?

she dreams of knotty entrails, wonders whom wombed whom? she crests,

swells for nine changes, then locks him away in a cloven pine as a bad guest.

Writer’s Notebook

“King Hunt” is a five-act verse drama that communes with The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, and Macbeth from an ecofeminist framework. Boundaries blur and the poems weave together Shakespeare’s diction, stage directions, and direct quotes, alongside a modern voice to embody the female writer haunted by the white male tradition. It drifts in and out of personas (Lady Macbeth, Weïrd Sisters, Paulina, and other non-Shakespearean/non-human figures) to explore the female identity as a fractured self, as a multitudinous self that shapeshifts between binaries of good/evil moral character and androgeny to achieve a common goal, that is, to seek revenge on Shakespeare, or perhaps, tread into prestigious terrain. Using the domestic art of performing "hostess" and the sonnet's live trap, the plan for regicide washes up the King to his fate on Sycorax's island. I found myself wanting a Wide Sargasso Sea for Sycorax, since we only view her from Prospero's perspective. Here, tables turn as Shakespeare now serves her throne. In Daphne fashion, I thought “the solution is tree!” The King's coral body (Alonso) would turn to bark—not to meet him with violence, but rather, engulf and contain him within something cloven, womblike. Humans have been a pretty lousy guest, so I found it fitting to flip the script and transform the King’s body into a home for parasitic plants: epiphyte, fern, matsutake.

About the writer