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POETRY FOCUS: LISA MARIE BASILE

Smoking is bad for you; poetry is good for you.  Balances out?
Eyewear is very pleased, thrilled, even, to share with you a few poems by an American poet who we adore, and not just because she wears the coolest glasses ever. She is one of the most provocative and promising of poets we've come across lately.

Lisa Marie Basile (pictured) comes from the bloodline of Giambattista Basile, the Italian fairy-tale writer. She is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program for creative writing in NYC. The author of Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York) and Triste (Dancing Girl Press), her newest chapbook, war/lock, is out from Hyacinth Girl Press in 2014. Recently, Noctuary Press, run from University of Buffalo, accepted her full-length poetry collection, APOCRYPHAL.

Her work can be seen in PANK, kill author, Johns Hopkin’s The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, decomP, Saudade Review, La Fovea, Prick of the Spindle, elimae & Pear Noir! among many other publications. She is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine, a women’s culture, lifestyle and art website. She also edits Patasola Press, a micropress that focuses on emerging, established and female writers. She is an assistant editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice.

if the memory went my way
 
the child me        [the me that is not me]
would be stuffed inside a woman-wife
 
as she carries two bouquets:
one from my father and one from me.
 
i am inside my mother.
the me that is not me.    the future me
 
born of the kind of love
that sneaks up on you.
 
we bring flowers to those who lose something,
but what if we preempted their loss--
 
would it make the heart hurt less?
could i comfort her before my birth,
 
a sort of starstuff that sacrifices
its own existence
 
to spare a woman some pain?
if only she knew how to avoid it:
 
the aisle draped in calla lillies & mache lantern
in chantilly lace and audacious hemline.
 
her waist is a meadow, but she hid it;
the small sacred burst of pain
 
red wine flowing free between two summer legs
on a sepia summer day.
 
we will love eachother endlessly
even if i have inherited her weaknesses.
 
  
father
 


this is my muted apricot & green mythology
the hum of power lines
children with tincan secrets
a girl naked, hilltopped,  with snowwhite tits
touching boys   
stolen Treasurer cigarettes
& high red underwear.
me.        Lolita me.            me with bubblegum
& magenta.                         i’m on the white pony
& he is so much bigger than what he really is:
fat            unbuttoned shirt                            
bald-headed silver specked,
a perfect god.

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