LISA MARIE BASILE

the rose garden

I don’t want to live in the ward, or in a house that wasn’t made for me; I don’t sleep in beds of pity, I don’t drink of troughs; I am the perpetual thing; I am filled of daybreak; when I am light, I am watched through peepholes; someone always stops me; someone always snuffs the thing I am; someone always fucks an animal in the garden; someone always bleeds the women out; someone always says I can’t be good enough; someone always sings the longest song; someone always sweeps the light out; someone says your mother isn’t coming home; someone says pack your bags girl; someone says wash that mouth out; someone says walk with me; become a number; become violation; become the sea and tide away; someone says I am as good as the ones who made me; someone says my makers are not good; someone says everyone with my name has disappeared; someone says they found me by the water; someone says come here; someone says your father is gone now; someone says come here, come here; someone kneels down; someone puts my hands into a bowl of rose water; someone washes me softly; someone says my name out loud; someone gives me back my sound; someone resurrects a shape; a shape-of and shaped-by; someone says look in the mirror; someone says girl, you are a hound; you made it to the end of the rose garden; you made the ending yourself.

Lisa Marie Basile is an editor, writer and poet living in NYC. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, 2014), as well as a few chapbooks. Her book NYMPHOLEPSY (co-authored with poet Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein), was a finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards and will be published by Inside the Castle. She is working on her first novella, to be released by Clash Books/Clash Media. Work can be found in Spork, Atlas Review, Grimoire, Queen Mobs Teahouse, and more. She is very much the embodiment of the Scorpio.