LISA MARIE BASILE / 3 POEMS — always crashing

saint of revenge

like remembering the sound that lives at the back of my throat
and at the end of the jetty where my body

blooms outside of the echo chambers of noise & glamour

yet I creep through its garden come night like the sickly thing I am.

how I was supposed to be able to live through this.

how the kind of vulture will pick at your childhood
and your smallness until you have retreated

with your shame in one hand and your divinity in the other.

one lives on, one dies. guess which.

how the truth is I parted the seas & become the seas,
how I called the sirens and become the siren

addicted to the idea of goodness,
which led me astray.

my dark wound is needing to be loved,
always shushing the ram of revenge.

how my fight is quieter, is alchemical, is tempered
because the waves are too strong.

& how I am exiled of your spit of narcissus
as the the dove in me rejects the deadness in you;

yet everywhere, mirrors, and mine enemies,
the perpetual thieves of light,
want so badly to be seen.

& how I see
through all things
even in my lashings.

how I crawl toward prayer
when I am already the prayer

how even in this sea of distraction

I am transfigured.

I see you, Nothingness. And I give you nothing but this poem.

saint of sin

diseased of you, drenched of you,
I am full of the weight
of you. the windows aren’t enough
in my room, in this house,
upon the altar of my body.

you speak and it feels like prayer.
why do I let you fill in the spaces
that I carved myself? I was asking for
desire; I got smallness instead.

there is only one way
of telling you the truth,
and that is with my hands clasped.
and there is only one way into the
garden, and that is
through a gate which disappears once you find it.
where is the feast of tigers? let me go to it.

there is a bed of ivy and I belong to it now,
led by hunger, shackled by
the earth’s mouth. I know
the ritual, this being called-forth, and being
emptied and emptied out by vines that never die.

My body in this house is a slow cell death,
moving through rooms forever in unrest,
and your heart two oceans side by side,
unblended, eating itself stupid.

I am floorboard vines of perpetuity,
tired of petals and petals and resilience.

The soil bleeds me of my want, enough
to keep this land alive, enough to dizzy me
harden me fuck me into whatever thing I am now.

I am this now. I am no longer that.
I am watching you
watch me and I am translating
the sounds of it.

I am so sick of your words
so empty and so drunk. Rainfall.

I am translating
a whole garden through the window.
I’ll learn its language one day.

saint of belonging

A girl in the dead of summer flips a sand hourglass and watches it dwindle; that’s me. I’m in the sand. I’m the summer ending, the great no man’s land between body and safety. To have a mother is to know your beginning. To be taken from a mother is to become starlight—a memory, strained through time, brilliant, always hovering without a name. I remember what it was like to have a mother, to have a place to put my body down. To keep little linen shirts folded in drawers, to paint the walls yellow, to lock the door and tell secrets. Then I became another thing, a girl who moves from space to space, eternally tumbling as hourglass, my pile of things becoming smaller. One day it was just a book and my body and a blank wall, mattress on the ground. The cardboard box is a cast spell. And then I started again.

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding creative director of Luna Luna Magazine, the author of a few books of poetry (most recently Nympholepsy, which is featured in Best American Experimental Writing 2020) and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times as well as The Magical Writing Grimoire. She’s written for The New York Times, Entropy, Catapult, On Loan from the Cosmos, Atlas Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and more. You can follow her at @lisamariebasile and @Ritual_Poetica.