Lisa Beskin has taught creative writing at Yale and Mount Holyoke College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming
in Fence, LIT, Volt, Jubilat, Fine Madness and other magazines.





The Future of an Illusion

1.

Each night God demands longer and longer lullabies.
I sing until my eyes redden. Some joke!
God doesn't need sleep, he just wants it.
He loves to curl on his side
and imitate the way people sleep without him.
God takes up room in my bed and inside me.
He peers out from behind my ribs
and pretends he's in jail.


2.

While God is home napping,
I slip out for tea.
Someone doing the crossword
wants the definition of dowager.
I say, a woman who becomes rich
from the death of her husband.

When God reads this, he darkens like a bruise.
Later, I warm his hands between my thighs.







Sorry, Sorry

I'm sorry God's name
is too terrible to speak. Late
in the night you whisper it to me
as you travel the village of your sleep.
Here an empty well,
here a road lined with goats…no, sorry,
that is my village, my well.
And it isn't dry, it brims
with our tears.
My breastbone is a thousand year-old stone.
Your own breastbone cracks,
for I have laid mine on it.
Here we lie, sealed together
by molten filaments
that stretch from cave to cave.







Little Elegy

Like a genie the hour pulls itself up
by a rope and disappears: head,
torso, legs and slippered feet.
The rope too vanishes,
and the walls, ceiling and roof.
What's left, cruelly, is memory.
Who will rebuild the house?







Recitative

“Leonardo!” I cried, and a hundred violets fell at his feet.
Our maritime woes were nothing compared with today.
As we quibbled outside the customs house,
I explained how caution was de rigeur,
what with all the new statutes, never mind the rough trade.
So it was our plans took the shape of purloined cutlery,
a certain moody prioress.
Leonardo's breast-knot was a Venetian alleyway.
He fiddled with it, humming a popular song -
"So you screwed the countess, too?"
I lay back on some salty planks,
digesting the previous night's
seductions. I don't remember the birds.
They were eclipsed by the trapeze.







The Masque of Persephone As Performed by Madame de Sade

For children the thrill of the zoo
is in thinking the world filled with such fabulous beasts;
for adults, it is the chance to contemplate the beasts at all.

On my wedding night, I heard the growl
from the dog's three throats
and something like a heart, fruit

pulsing on a tree, the seeds ticking within.
I bit my lip to make him think I had eaten.
When that did not work, I ate.

Here in the depths of his gaze
I see my mother, eyes wide
and empty as the sky, her arms

stretched towards some earlier hour.
But what are the green fields
compared to his icy love?

And who could ever tell me?