Adeena Karasick

From EICHA II: The Book of Lumenations

The theurgy of delight is a drawing down. The urgency of the light is a drowning dawn, the resurgence of the light is adoring drawn; a drawing down, a drowning dawn the urgence, a drowning, a dawning a knotted dawn the delight of the light resurgent alight in the urgent emergence; to light in the days of our hunger

And in the ache of asylum

I have bent my bow
framed in the anchor of candied dalliance —

screaming in strung shadows, revenance

where limning sutures, festooned in sunshift

Lie with me
in the illicit quiver
of knotted conscience

Languish
through whispered harbors’

pressed exile
among evening’s inheritance;

the providence of slipped

semes slants
sucking twilight

of latticed scatter

From EICHA III: The Book of Lumenations

Sheltered in netted inlets
of ripped dyssemia, fleshy sequiturs, wisteria, the taste of broken bans—

Hail the billow of campy siege, the truance of gilded travaille

And make me dwell in the darkened wreckage of feverish dread

In the censored resonance of pliant heaves;

The plated shudder of my parade.

Burn me in the binding bias in torqued harrow.

For I am woke in the swindled aperture of fibrous light;

And I am giddy with shaded want in the quiescence of ludic clues

Naked with his yoke in my mouth

Let him sit sultry for he has laid upon me

Let him put his mouth into the dust

Offer his shackles to the smitten

Let him be filled with peaches

From EICHA IV: The Book of Lumenations

And as care curls / in her swirled whorl’s spurred leurre / stirred spur of porous roar whose flayed fray forêts flurried fury fiery folly flares in the florid lore of soaring horror in the ripped wrought raw lot

And in the raging contagion
of the yoked hurrah
we are riddled in thick drift
and drunk with iniquity—

asking whose balletic thirst
is clasped
in the synonymy

of our yaysay, purer than sinew, and wet with dusk
ruddier than choral, sapphire, milking crimson syrups
sifted riffs of spilt surfeits

Whose skin a

buttered vortex of fruited
folds fluted affinities
of ripened whim

crowned in syllabic aberrance

Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 12 books of poetry and poetics. Most recently is Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017). https://www.adeenakarasick.com