Glittering silver snow lines Winter’s home, furnishing it with comfortable coldness and arctic blue mood. My spirit lives in winter, jealously watching the rich earth for the arrogant arrival of tulips. All is sleeping and heavy with the weight of dead leaves. Ghosts build fires in their encampments by the frosty river. My name is a river rearranged. My name is arraigned. My personality sails by, trailed by sharks.
Author: Lisa Marie
On the Cusp
The bluebirds nest on the cusp of my awareness. What is beyond my awareness is bright light and new colors. At my dark periphery, morose shadows of old pleasures, crumbling to ash in the weight of God’s judgment on them. The baby bird will fly away soon, to the morose forest choking the back of my throat. Regret is heavy, and it sucks in many to its great gravity.
Language
Language babbles like a brook in the snaggle toothed mouth of a baby, but pour like the falls from my cherry juice lips that shine with adoration so my soul mate can see himself in the gleam of my smile. Language smells perky and pertinent and penitent. She lures Silence to his death. Language belongs to no one, and so leaves me every day to rut in the autumnal mouth of another while my mind wanders over a plane of math so wild, imaginary numbers grow like brambles, piercing me. My pureed mind leaks out.
November is Coming
Velvet encases me like a casket at this party I snuck into. My dress is filled with frills and thrills, a slinky black little thing exposing my soft porcelain thighs to the crushed purple velvet. Death is LARPing as October, and no one knows he’s in costume. Ghosts glow glacier blue and just as cold. November watches from behind the velvet curtain, ready to wash away childhood and joy. November with her blue eyes, onyx hair, and burns all over her body from a thousand candles.
Nothing
I read my bones for answers to all my problems with my x ray eyes. In the hollow tree of winter, a raccoon and a plague of rose scented blood. Winter burrows into my name. Snow fills the chambers of my personality. Suddenly when I speak, hail pops out. My x ray eyes and cold hands pry the truth from the fingers of my enemies, who run a ghost factory in my yard. They are hiring – for ghosts. My eyes are glass anyways. Why not apply? I have lots of experience with zero.
Consecrated
My inner cathedral of rapturous, buttery sound delights in the reddest and bluest flavors of light. Word sweet. Soul sour. Combustible proverbs delight my ears, raised as they were on the music of nature’s wisdom. Nature passed a cigarette to me at a party once. I took a puff and found it was laced with chlorophyll. I was jealous of trees for a year. In my cathedral, an altar of tourmaline and hope strung from the ceiling like diamonds. Bless this shell of paradise, Lord. Consecrate even my hair to your effervescent name.
Eschatological Mess
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.
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.
Miniature Moon 