Alice Ashe | lilith

Her flesh is antithetical to him. It oozes the firstness of everything felt & the secondness of everything thought. She is undomesticated & like a windstorm her savage eyes upset & upend everything that is ordered within him. Did you say your mother was planning to stop by he will ask & April will say yes I mentioned that & he will quietly disappear & later I don’t see why you’re so afraid of her & he will reply (cynical) isn’t she from Georgia & she will roll her eyes yes but mom’s not like that things are different now it’s the twenty-first century & he will say exactly (comma) we’re all still so young

& probably she will kiss him while the unsaid rest settles prettily into the floorboards.

for every smoker i’ve ever fucked

Your hand alight on my cigarette skin

(shall we?) breathe in

our tar-stick filthy sweet

illuminated selves

our soot-heavy cells

mingling, settle

in the chiasmatic fogging of our breaths—

(oh I love) our overs and acrosses

our hopscotch-tangled legs and laces, heat-saturated

traces of

all our little linkages—

(shall we?) disintegrate, commit

to our mutual ash

tight-laced

It was July when the fever burrowed deep

beneath the snow-soft blankets

of your skin, and blushed your cheeks, twin

rose-petal virgins, wet

with the dew of night’s discovering

and while you murmured and dreamed I took

your sweat-soft hand and your gypsy grandma’s

book on palmistry, and then, dear heart, I laid you

(oh, so wonderfully) open as our waiting caskets

(and still sometimes I feel your braided lifeline, twisting

over and around my ligaments, tendons, knotting

us in a mess of muscle and bone).

for lips and travelers

Soft hungry animal

devouring continents

my body or

the land to which it has returned

whispers your travels

feeds your dank breath

crumbles—

I am not

the vestige of your heat

the willow’s sun-scorched leaf

though I think you do uproot me

I lovingly decay

the lover’s coda: sapphic reprise

There’s a dab of lipstick on your tooth,

plum, smack

on the jagged edge where you

run your tongue over again

and again—

a stone on the beach,

tide rushing in—

and do you think one day

I may wear you down, out,

run my gaze over your face

until I’ve washed it out, away,

all your little rough edges, you?

I only know when the moon is high

and your hand is pulled just so

toward mine

by some hushed impulse of the night,

a little more, each time,

I erode.

Alice Ashe is a twenty-something lady/grrrl/queen bitch with a fancy degree in gender studies and the soul of an aging British librarian. She’s currently shacked up with an art school dropout in Atlanta, Georgia, where she writes, acts, reads Tarot, drinks tea, hugs trees, spoils her dog, and waits tables on the side.