Lisa Marie Basile is a writer+poet based in NYC. She is the author of Light Magic for Dark Times & the creator of Luna Luna Magazine.
nycterine
I confess dissociative, swing a heavy summer down on me. I will not falter
but I am fall.
If it seems I have flowered, you are mistaken. Our night attracts simpler things. Other things we don’t see. That I might be bright white,
a visible thing. I am not a visible thing.
I am steeple, pure, filled of daydead. I am its pupil. Not dull, or charred, or fragment. Not piled. I am the holder of small things and the other body
of my body.
I read all the books. I opened them one by one. I startled it, night, and said sorry. As if the shapes were not mine, but a star deflated. I wished for it to be like this: The small round table: forlorn as children, me standing with finger on splinter, on edge. The table collects us
when we come near it.
We gather around it and make of
the shapes.
The fountain: I came to it, to throw coins in. The water was cool and sullied. I saw it and felt it did not see me. And I see, I saw. I saw, I’ve seen what the sounds of space have made: a basin of body, a swell, a ravine
where water is water and water is me.
The white plate, I broke it. I mean, I dropped it, and it broke. One piece is here, the other buried as a sick lover in the meadow. It is meaning, the meaning of something that kills me: this porcelain thing. That it is,
and is not, that it lives and does not.
A little blood in the cracks,
a spoil of self, all made to say hello
I am here.
—
© Lisa Marie Basile
Lisa Marie Basile is the author of APOCRYPHAL. Her poetry and other work can be seen in the Best American Poetry, PANK Magazine, Tin House, The Nervous Breakdown, Johns Hopkin’s The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Huffington Post and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She is the editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and a co-curator for Diorama, a NYC-based collaborative poetry/music salon. Stay Thirsty Media recently featured her as an emerging poet worth reading. She is a graduate of the New School’s MFA in Writing program, and works as an editor.
