September 12th: Poetry by LE Francis

Editor’s note: we will be delivering individual works from our first issue to your inbox daily, until we run out! If you want to view the full first issue of bloodbathhate, click here.

Thank you LE, these poems fit beautifully into our issue and we are amazed by your raw talent!

The last supper at a strip club

Do you even know how my body
should look? Pink as the inside
of an conch shell & legs like the lobes
of my lungs. Let me be, let me be

seen, let me be seen wholly, holy. Let me
become myself in the act of being seen.
The universe sways its hips & a star is born,
God sure is a horny motherfucker

but I digress, I lean unto thou & thou sayest
time is a bloated tick on the back of His hand
& it is the digestion of time which makes flesh.
Time becomes shit becomes inches of skin

corrupted by a summer afternoon when I was
nine, I ate three otter pops & fell asleep
on the lawn. Pink & blue & green – the imprint
of grass on my back hatched with lines

rendered from the movement of the cosmos; my body
inside this masterpiece, the elongated
berth of my sins caught in the distortion of the living.
My Lord, are the things that matter made lighter

in the presence of sin? Shorter goodbyes,
shattered fingers, an uneasy sense that I am not
actually living this life. Oh God, I am a blur,
I am a whisper, I am a flutter of the tablecloth

within & without, in your eyes & my own, & I dance
this table, haunt this painting. Legs like the outreaching
tendrils of a dying star. We see each other
across the table & for a brief moment, we exist.

Manifest

An explosion of wingbeats climb the sky
punctuate a conjuration, create music as long & forked as my tongue, daisy tendrils 
of ink & stem catch wind, rattle this shadow split 

open, divide imaginary hemispheres of heart, a breach 
of gore & tears, as green & soft as the ferns that graze 
my ankles whispering prayers to exorcize all wanting 

                                                    from me; I am petals-
blooded & in bloom; if you love me not, stop
exacting yellow blades from my veins as proof. Speak 

this spell from both sides of my whore mouth — love me,
love me not, quit your rock-eyed quiet, 

we both know
             there is nothing beneath the ridge of your ribs, rip 
                          my heart from the hollow of my throat; your tired eyes lost
             under the shadow of your granite crown; pinnacles cut through 
                                       the fog of my body, 

entrails like garnets pour over the mountainside, love me, 
love me not, meadows languish under the broken clouds, love 
me, love me not, summer-spent, smokestack sky, glare my green

heart gray again. Breathe deep & remind me & the meadow
who it is that you cannot love.

LE Francis is a recovering arts journalist writing poetry & fiction of varying length from the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. Find her online at nocturnical.com.