excerpts from X
it is not subtle, our kind of sin
as when bioluminescent angels glitter the black expanse
in phosphorescent light. it is called nyctiluca.
isn’t it ravishing?
isn’t it how it feels to hunt
and make of our meat God and child.
of knives, and of dim body
we resurrect the self.
ruin of things clean and of it, the holy.
and it went on like this
in dreams
of fields
where we could cut the body from the body.
I stood over you
and cut my palm through the center in an X.
I stood over your body and poured
down like summer light through tinted pane.
here body, now you are of me--
of this, this summer that holds us sick and grey.
of my X you are so pretty,
and resurrect.
O, this black hour,
and the lit up blades
of grass under starlight
illuminate and illuminating.
how I am alive
and you,
how you are not,
and how you rub it in.
–
they ask me how you can love a maniac,
but honestly, I can’t remember much of you, only the cufflinks
and the way you stuffed yourself into a black jacket,
and the way you glide full and so tall, your body echoing ten voices
talking over the same radio channel along a nighttime drive,
not English or anything, but an underworld song.
honestly, the clamouring of me still remains. how my body changed positions
like water as you charmed it hands up in sermon,
and I sprayed blood like down across the floor.
–
I put my x in her x. Not there, but in her god space. My fingernails were filed today, round & loud like x and when I did this she x and it was as beautiful as Atlantis. I could not contain her world, and the black sea, its birth place. I wore cherry lips to kiss her all over like the x that she is. And it was so hard to x her after I x her. And it was so hard to see myself in mirrors with my hands and nails all filled with x. I am so afraid of x When I wear my hair high up, and let her pull my ponytail at least a part of her liked it, I know this, before I x her out and into the garden.
Lisa Marie Basile is the author of APOCRYPHAL and the chapbooks Andalucia and war/lock. She is the editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine, and her poetry and essays have appeared in PANK, Tin House, Coldfront, The Nervous Breakdown, The Huffington Post, Best American Poetry, PEN American Center, Dusie, The Ampersand Review, and many other publications. She’s also a perfume writer and a freelance writer. She holds an MFA from The New School.