Lisa Marie Basile

What We Talk About When We Talk About Satan

Our cuticles are bleeding by noon, a whole mattress covered in fluid pinstripes.

It is easy to love when you have a wide sky and a table set with yellow china.

For years I would only suck dick wearing a plague mask
             and then I became a woman.

Of age, don’t love a man whose eyes work well, or at all

& raise a lynx in the backyard
             trained to kill quickly
when the heart gets too big to continue
and the body is loosened to ribbons.

The irony of promise
is that it wears at its subjects,

remorseless, with teeth.
 

War/lock III

forthcoming in war/lock (Hyacinth Girl Press)

how you unloved me so—

             you slow motioned

             me

the brick house
             [my mouth]

atom-bombed

             into blasted brown cloud

             tea
             cups

             [shattered]

              a white drape

             [unfurling]

three white pears
lustrous & thrown

             stockings hung to dry

[o, your hips, you say]

slowly, slow, an offing calls

             [vows]

always love hard through sickness

[‘when you woke smelled of sick’}

harp
             [plucked hesitance]

for the garden wedding

amor, amor
             one pearl loose to the floor

another man,                   he who
             climbed inside me,

climbed inside

you

to set me

free

like tableware

             [or cutlery]

for a br& new
             morning

the pyrrhic whiteness of

             morning motion
the return from the tomb
             as hopeful
                          as blood
there is nothing
             left here to love

grey ash in droves

when the black cloud
sidles away from

that which is

             my glory

 


Lisa Marie Basile holds an MFA from The New School and is the author of Triste, from Dancing Girl Press. The Poetry Society of New York released her chapbook, Andalucia (Brothel Books, 2011). war/lock, a chapbook, will be released by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2014. She is the founding editor and publisher of Patasola Press, and is an assistant editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal. She is part of the #bookdress party at footknots.com.