✨ saint of the before times

slipped off like satin...

saint of the before times

With roots
                who would I have been?
I was slipped off like satin.
And suddenly it was two decades later
with the same emptiness.
What girl can know the abyss
without becoming it?
It is easy to give in to the prowl,
to stain the coverlet
come June mornings
in the blue breeze
                      in the loom of eternal afternoons.
The promise of revelation
is a body
is a chapel
is a return to somewhere home-shaped.
How do you hold a thing when you’ve never known
                the contained?

—Lisa Marie Basile

From Saint Of, White Stage Publishing, © Copyright 2025. Used with permission of the poet. Photo by Allec Gomes, Unsplash license.