Black sex sings like a siren against my white sheets.
What quilted questions can I answer,
with my tongue lodged in your pink lips,
while the sadomasochistic sunlight slinks slowly
through blue blinds?
Author: Lisa Marie
The Narrator
The narrator is mopping the floor with my tears,
which for him fall like rain through a hole
in the roof.
What promise this day had,
born at the height of the malleable moon.
What now,
since favor, faith, and fancy have
disintegrated?
The narrator begins with an article
that will barely clothe me from the cold.
Outsonneted
I have been outsonneted by a suction cup,
Clinging to my window like a starfish to the sea.
Lately my similes get away from me,
Dogs always unearthing hideous bones in
My backyard.
The curious climate of my moist mind
Is most conducive to marigolds, azaleas,
The pancreas.
My face is all sugar,
My tongue a cola.
See the stained glass the suction cup holds?
Memorabilia from an unremembered saint.
A Jealous Math
The floor is a guess,
is clear like water.
It is raining June in my hair.
My clothes are brimming with butterflies.
I am a sour after note to their beauty.
I was born to rise
to shatter sky.
Instead a jealous math
embalming me
fills me with mud.
My Mind is the Zenith of Razors
Somber crescent shaped thoughts
dig into my mind like fingernails.
I have never had fingernails.
I am made of teeth and zippers,
always coming together then pulling apart.
My mind is the zenith of razors,
My hair the ambition of every death wish.
Pharmacological Fog
Recapturing yourself will be easy.
White still in the bedroom,
structure from private, necessary snow.
dreaming of silence.
Your mind is a playground of artillery.
Capturing the sense of yourself will be hard,
Lost 2 feet tall in a field of chaff.
The women have needles and no yarn.
A man sits toward the curdling sun,
his face a mouth.
Sound your siren song
A gentle offering of wisteria wishes
and sulking letters.
Give her a sonorous rope to tie round her wrist
a little balloon bobbing desperately toward mass.
Bag of Humiliation
Some things are just a humbling experience. Having a bag attached to you in which you pass gass and excrete with no control about when or how loud or where is simply mortifying. My stomach finally started working with the bag last night while the nurse was in the room with me and it was terrifying because it was so embarrassing.
I can’t believe I’m going to have to live like this for three to six months. Or that other people do it their whole lives. How will I bear being close to people and how will others bear me? How can I go to public places?
I am literally going to have to change my very conception of self and surroundings. I am going to require more mercy and compassion from my husband and other people. I have to hope and pray they give it to me, or this will be a lonely time in my life.
I don’t feel sexy. I feel disgusting and gross. This is messing with my identity, but then I remember that I should have my identity in Christ. To put it crassly, God loves me but everyone else thinks I am nasty. I am still a poet and creator. I am still a wife and mother. I still have a place in the body of Christ.
But I feel so repulsive and isolated.
Depression
The cessation of Fire
in me is like a white wall of Holy cold.
I manufacture crosses.
I carry most of them.
Others I strap to my man and my baby.
Suffering sleeps at the end of my bed,
takes up space.
drives me away in the middle of the night.
Sometimes I drive to a gold mine and wish for another God
if I cannot have another me.
The Scent Radius of a Rose as a Unit of Measurement
The scent radius of a rose as a unit of measurement.
My smile weighs too much,
crumbles off my face.
I’m sick of fried hair and unstoppable worry.
My secrets hate me and my eyes betray me.
On the beaches are boxes of life
watching the great red shipping containers float on the horizon.
Simply put
I have no allies I have not bought
And I drink old snow.
Housewife
Grateful skirts swirl in a breeze maybe meant for them.
Design is Holy,
is enamored of its Designer,
is a crossroads of means and ends.
A housewife manufactures sunshine in her laboratory,
the beakers from the store always having a sale,
her thesis supervised by green,
and critiqued by her children.
After 20 years who will know whether the
skirts were mended or replaced?
Just that they were infused with laughter
and smelled like mother in the living room
living with her eyes full.
Translated into Afrikaans and Xhosa, then back:
Skirts twirl in the grateful air
they were meant for.
Design and the Holy Spirit,
are enamored
of each other.
Is the intersection of the cross where it all begins?
The woman who produced the sun in her lab,
is studying all the ways you make happiness from the mundane.
Her thesis is green from watching her children.
After 20 years will you know that
the aprons can be repaired or replaced?
You will appreciate the humor.
She won’t.
skirts and gratitude for the atmosphere,
either of them.
Design and Holy Spirit,
make enamored designs,
are the ends on the cross.
The woman who makes the sun in her lab,
Her laboratory in Delaware furnished by a company
in Hong Kong.
Her thesis supervision is green.
So is the clock looking at her children’s energy,
their youth,
her youth.
After 20 years you will know that
the skirts can be repaired or replaced.
As you appreciate the humor in
And sort mothers by whether they baked cookies or used the microwave.
In her eyes you live fully,
live fully alone.
Miniature Moon 