poetry of the summer-noir

Invoking the saints of fever-dream July

I started working on the full manuscript for what would become SAINT OF last year, though it truly took shape during the sweaty malaise of summer. I’d just returned from a month in Sicily and Malta—my head swimming with mosaic and volcanic wine, ancient ruins and sleepy fishing villages. It was a strange whirlwind of a summer, the kind that feels like a temporal ghost.

I got married in Palermo and felt clobbered by heady and euphoric post-wedding blues. I felt a holiness had happened to and through me—and then slipped right through my fingers, like a lightning bug. I could still see the light, but it was fading into summer’s death.

When I returned to the states, I found out that my spine was broken, and so began an interior journey into writing. I was home more and moving less. Our AC broke a dozen times, the heat was suffocating, and there were ongoing forest fires here in New Jersey and New York. The air always smelled, and there was a deep sense of urgency and fear as we prepped for election season.

I retreated into the murky, hot otherworld of memory and daydream, splayed out in cotton dresses on my bed—translating the anxiety, fear, obsession, and madness of my life and that strange summer into these poems.

I wrote endless invocations to the saints—saints as aspects of self, saints as emotions, saints as memories. And every poem was suffused with this muggy, carnal summer energy—as if the poems were themselves sticky and ripe, gilded by rotten fruits and sea salt.

Here are three of them. The last two are intended to look like fully-justified prose-poems, but Substack doesn’t have that option.

saint of abandon

The summer follows me 
into the confessional
as shadow. 

In this ornate and muggy house of god, 
I am crowded by wood and transgression. 

The impulse lives latent within me. 
	Something like ruin. 

Repentance has taken up shape within me. 
I have amassed a thousand shapes.

I don’t want to get rid of the thing. 
	I want to go on feeding it while I am still beautiful. 
		I want the perpetuity of starless night. 

At least without light you have purpose. 
Without light you are always in a state of seeking— 
or is darkness light waiting to be born?

I fear absolution would erase me.
          I interpret god as an invitation for sin. 
                   I stand at the black hole and look down.

saint of salvage

In July I spoke only Italiano, come una principessa, and danced only on terraces, somersaulting through the depravity and rose bud. It was libidinal, deepthroating beauty to ease the grief. Yet the earth knew. Swimming in Isola Bella I met the dolor of the sea. I clung to the shore with my hands wretched in the air, consumed of my wound. I contained such lack. 

When black smoke filled my bedroom I left only with what I could carry and felt the sovereignty of loss. My body with its bare hands contorted, or in prayer, touching the ligaments between having and not-having, and the kingdom where everything that was taken could be given back. 

Incredulous, divine; this ruin — the mother of wholeness.

saint of sepulture

It’s the summer again. It wants me. How overgrown of ivy, how empty and full of longing. My memories of it are daisy chain; honey-like, and looming through the years. As eave, as curtain, as decanter. One day it is a summer day, and then it 10 summers ago. The summer takes me hard by hand, watches me from the other room. How it took me from me, made my body into a cavity, wringing the wet from my lips. What gash it left me tending.


The summer was always waiting, a waiting, 


		a wait, 

				  wait, 

						    wait. 


It wanted me, hunted me. And when the hunt found me it was still hungry. How I heaved my loaded heart. I walked into the wood and never came out; a too-long sort of night. It was the kind that sends you back in fragments. Which fragments? It could have been daylight. It should have been daylight. It could have been. It could have been me in the window, and then me in the lake, and then me in the rose grove and then yesterday.

Notes & thanks to the editors below (please read the poems over at their sites!).

Saint of Sepulture was published by Lover’s Eye Press.
Saint of Salvage was published by Moria Magazine of Woodbury University
SAINT OF (the book) was published by White Stag Publishing.

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