Lightning embroiders excitement in the bruised sky. Clouds call my name in a whisper that smells like adventure. I have become one with my back porch. Not the one my father once painted red. The one coated in stardust and crass lemonade. My home is built from my rib and will submit to my will. Home is a flower with benzos in the petals, my tiredness a river of parasitic glass carving obscenities down a mountain. I long to make this eschatological mess into a nest for babies and birds, but my frazzled mind licks sunshine for the sour buzz.
Author: Lisa Marie
Bratty Dreams
The world kicks back a cola while bratty dreams kick a deflated ball around my yard. Daily, I feed chickens, Regret, and Damage. My electrocuted soul is singed and sweet and sweats longing. Longing looms like predestined lore over me. I once could do great things. Now my speech is crusted over with child like confusion. I want to remember the information that swam up and stung me in my friend’s pool, but like all gelatinous goodness, the only record of it is on my thighs.
Sex Red Phone
A sex red phone rings off the hook. My lipsticks paint a mural of youth on my face, while my Vitality goes out and lights the faces of younger women. It is true that I’m a candle, but I am also a c sharp note, highest octave. I am living in the light laced shadow of the triumvirate because I am too dappled with darkness to live in the likeness of goodness. The triumvirate of pain, peonies, poison. The mind is a cigarette machine. The phone is still ringing. Myself, age 22 on the end of the line, wanting to know if it all turns out okay.
Blood in the Water
At a plastic desk from a discount store, I pen my memoirs in lipstick with a raven who taught me everything I know about distrust and linoleum. The standard issue daylight won’t do anymore. I saw a shard of paradise, exuding every color, and now the manila boss of my waking hours can’t contain me. If I write anything less true than a martyr’s blood, the raven pecks my hands. If I don’t sweep soon, the dust will riot and burn, but the raven reviews my writing for salt or fish, and the hostile country of my face conceals no faults. In the variegated landscape of my mind’s private vineyard, thunder in the wine press and blood in the water.
Screaming
Time curves like a voluptuous, sumptuous woman. Around the bend of her hip, cave men paint my dreams on the walls of a cave that will cave in. My dreams, undiscovered by excitable paleo scientists, will lie dormant and mate with moss for years. My name is written in moss on the cliffside of my disagreeable mind. My moss minions mine my Mondays more and more for maturity. They find none. Just a crumbling psyche bent low over her blue screened mind machine, screaming –
The Carabiner
My vows stand before me, full spectral specters with gray eyes, wondering at my frailty. Without God, I can’t climb this hill. He sips coffee and unbinds ropes. If only my hands were not greased with ambition. Ambition is always a little greasy and dirty if not coupled with saintliness, and blended like rum and coke. I wanted to be the best and forgot to ask why or at what or even how. The Carabiner roughens the rope to give me grip. My vow to love pulsates pure pink and asks, “What happens to me if you can’t do this?” “I can’t do it on my own, but He promises to wrap my wrists and raise me up on the Last Day.”
Ghosts
My ghosts are highlighted punk pink, yikes yellow, and billowy blue for rapid categorization. Miraculous myriad of ghosts follow me daily, even to the Realism market by the river to purchase my intravenous memories. The Dewey Decimal system was my first and most honest friend, and even he can’t contain the multitude of subjects hidden in the dimension I lick like a keypad to open my front door when I stumble home from the market, my name eviscerated by pain. Sobbing, one ghost asks to fog a glass one last time with her breath. I hold up my frightened mirror, loan the yellow ghost my warmth, and feel a lightbeam length of life force leave me like a lacy lexicon.
Daisy Hunter
A hurt huntress of daisies, I came to bleed and break. I’ve bled over the hungry fields, the glades gladdened with a lattice work of sunbeams, and watched flowers flow like a river. The roses are baptized in their hues of red and blue. I shed like salt crystals over the river, feeding fish that prowl the surface collecting crafty crud. I am the queen of crafty crud and cuddly credibility. What will I do when the blood, the skin, my name are all gone? Who will cull the daisies, keep insidious floral populations in check? No one cares that an orchid ate a child last week, or that he said the 6 year old’s chi was better than crack and then proceeded to bloom in 13 colors for 6 days afterward. The mother is still muttering and mumbling down in the garden, broken and bent by grief. And who will feed my fish that clean the sunlight off the surface of the water to let the depths have their dependable darkness?
St Dymphna
Embroidered music, rustic symphonies in autumn shades of regret. Comfortable in the rain, death writes sonnets with his fingers on my fogged window. Crepuscular dreams muscle into my psyche. Dreams of hours coated in a sticky, sweet love. St Dymphna, pray for me. The hour of my reckoning stretches over my house the way the afternoon usually does, languid and lazy. How electrical the lies I tell myself! Do you smell the acrimonious fire?
Good Fridays
Fantastic, frothy Fridays foam up at the edges of my life. I’m out for coffee with the Antagonist, and I hate coffee. I crave cold, curious Saturdays of discovery. I like to wander around the English language after dark and get mugged. An elegy broke my nose once. At dawn, the weekend will taste like candy. Sugar is true and lethal. I didn’t choose the thorn burrowing into my side, but I will die beside it.
Miniature Moon 