Read More: A brief Q&A with Lisa Rosinsky
Lilith in Exile
I.
God said I just want my breath back
but I ran. Now here I am,
walking to the train in cargo pants,
Doc Martens. Golden hair dyed dark.
It’s not true that Eve came after I’d gone.
In those days, it was still ask
and ye shall receive. And I begged.
About the bait: Persimmon? Pomegranate?
No. It was no apple but a peach; sweet cleft
she bit because she missed the taste of me.
What you might have heard
is how I refused to lie beneath him.
Lie is right. I wouldn’t do it.
There was no fall, in other words,
from grace. I fled.
II.
Early fall. Crows and jays
replace cicadas in my backyard’s
traffic-muffled music. They’re tearing down
the overpass at South Street.
The boy next door shouts at his dog.
Every day, this cluttered jazz,
and once I did give praise but
it’s too easy to say the body’s
my religion now, or the page is.
And what of it, if I still yearn
for faith, love, some salvation?
III.
I board the blue line at Maverick
and ride toward Wonderland—station names
that sound like hackneyed fairy tales.
Get off at Airport, cloud-bound.
I know what they say about me, that my
next lover was an angel. A story written
by the anxious sons of Adam. That I birth
monsters, eat babies, roam
the night, bat-like. As if wings or stars
would be any consolation.
Aphrodisiac
Dover, New Hampshire
It was not the saltiness but the lack
of flavor that surprised my tongue, a quick gulp
and it was gone, empty
shell with a scrap of muscle still attached
still clutched in my raisined fingers.
We had to keep lifting our feet or the silt
would suck them in, we laughed when
Eve got stuck and shrieked. She grabbed my shoulder
and I pulled her free. The sea
has no hunger, it does not want […]
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Installation Artist
Condemned buildings drew her
like the swirl at the center […]
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Lisa Rosinsky has been a finalist for the Slapering Hol Chapbook Prize, the Fugue Poetry Contest, and the Morton Marr Poetry Prize, and was the recipient of the 2016 Associates of the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Baltimore Review, Salamander, Measure, 32 Poems, and other journals and anthologies. She is a graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she was a Robert Pinsky Teaching Fellow and a teaching artist at the Boston Arts Academy. Lisa’s debut novel, Inevitable and Only, was named one of Barnes & Noble Teen’s top 12 “Most Anticipated Indie Novels of 2017.”
Read More: A brief Q&A with Lisa Rosinsky