Breadcrumbs

LISA MARIE BASILE

Trionfo della morte

After a long night, after a discord of self. After silence, and all that is carried inside of it, there is a kingdom in your name. That it does not exist when you arrive but is always there. It is not waiting for you, but it waits. It is not of you; you are of it. It is you. After a bath of ocean locks you in and old kings come to hold you to their chest, this place will be a living thing. It is not made for you, but made by you. It is made up of you. It is the blood of the long way home. It is the peacock & grotto. What wound it wants. What wound it fills. It is the white bird. It is the awayness of long nights, too long, too dead, too held, too sick. It is the hereness of some peace; the proximity to the grotesque, the longitudes of the divine. What silt, what silt. That you have straddled the cusp.

CLAUDINE NASH

Consider that right now
somewhere
beneath a sycamore,

a trace of you
is drifting from the cracks
of an abandoned
cigar box.

As you sleep soundly
clear across the eastern
seaboard,

a stranger
with a rusted spade

is reaching down
to brush the earth
that has been weighing
upon its wooden lid
these nights.

Now he lifts this
muddy capsule,

he peels back its seal
ever so gingerly,

and the universe
reclaims the air
that sits inside.

This is how
you come to awaken
whole and weightless,

how when you raise
your eyes towards
the morning sky

up floats
a peace sign pendant;

your first forty-five;

an ink well;

a perfectly preserved set
of words and beliefs;

the self you buried,

intact
and free.

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