Author: Lisa Marie

Lisa Elsewhere

Cylindrical sisterhood rattles down my childhood lane like a can. The wind was never my friend. My feral blood echoes its request for a sedative. The life within me is hot and knows no peace. My sister rides a unicycle, holding hands with everything we mean when we say, “I had a good time. Really.” My bones slide safely from my skin, prop up a Lisa elsewhere who chews snowflakes for their originality and drinks the blood of the Lamb.

The Male Gaze

Feminine breeze tousles the leaves. Autumn candy and coolness and customary costume. Bashfully, I look away from my plate of autumnal goodness and feel him touch the sweater of my cable knit body. The male gaze is so kind and generous compared to the female gaze. Where my female gaze sees stretch marks and drinks my absinthe, the male gaze sees my generosity of softness and toasts the haunting video poetics of my hair communing with the breeze. He makes me a sandwich. I dance for him in octopus octave, my intelligence in compliant arms and luscious, plump living. This language feels weirdly spacious. I need a poetics with room for me. The male gaze strokes my breasts with a silken touch, while the female auditions for the laundry list. I feel powerful and delicate when he plants me in fleece and calls me snow flower.

Enough?

The sun was not enough for me. My face was his rose, tender with fragility and sweet spice. My voice is a cornerless sonnet wandering over the badlands of my curving, roiling psyche. I needed more to wrap the soft landscape of my body in a dream of domesticity and feral, fertile goodness. He selects me for his vase. I smile, a horizon stretching across my floral face, my eyes the blue moons good things happen in once.

No Satisfaction

Wrapped in the same name as my nemesis, a theory frictioning frantically with a reality so sharp that it cuts, and the theory is bleeding, and we drink too much at lunch. Too much. The ice in the pond is too much. A patchwork of cold. The theory of feminine wild wiles can get no satisfaction. She bares her hair to a hillside of honor and visibility. An elevator, snipped from its cable, floats toward frosty regions of unprepared wine.










Biggest Regret

Red code of dawn for love letters from Hades. The grass is always greener -or sharper- on the other side. The machine buzzes in my head, strips memories from me like old wallpaper. Treatment, they said. The forlorn math of always being emptier than you should be. Suffering souls singe. Early in the morning, I drove over the alligator river. Not I. My husband drove. And I went. I was a cave. A crayon. They broke me, but I still color. I just can’t see lines anymore. It’s all a disarray of color and exultation and expectation, and everywhere the smell of terrarium.





A Dirty and Dangerous Little Thing

I’ve been telling a story with leaves and flowers I pressed the life out of. I’ve been telling a story about blue blood, ballerinas, and balls. The story has many climaxes, like a woman with her lover who is with the beat of her heart. My heart is a snare drum, making rickety rock music and frightful calls to war with the past. I don’t allow children to listen to my story and neither should you. How grace bred with elegance until the world, fat with starlight, burst and space filled with shimmering crystals of silence. My heart, a dirty and dangerous little thing, leapt from a shadow into the great knowing.






We Will Never Reap

Unattended sparrows sow the fields with lavender. The fragrance betrays the eroticism of the fluffy clouds, looking down like a lover on a world that doesn’t know it’s asleep. When through the pearlescent gates the ocean begins to pour like a spilled drink, I made a raft from my studio desk, with an umbrella for a roof. Beneath the waves, Leviathan with centuries of teeth and an appetite for the twisted. The lavender will wash away. The warped odor of regrettable flesh will be all that is left. I sail to a  rippled shore covered in sunbathing dreams.