By Emma De Lisle
A few of the stories were good: Lazarus, Cana, the adulteress. Who doesn’t love a stoning? Or picturing him balancing on that dark sea, feet peeping over the waves that some hand ground down out of those purples and black-blues, phthalo blue, and Egyptian, something iridescent crushed in to sign what you can’t see below. Nacre, maybe. Like a salamander in a flash-photo. Oil on the water like skin. Or like that pearly interference stretched over a raw muscle, its meat-cells cut against the grain. Light-struck. Divided. And the angel. I can hear it. Not a swishing sound, like you’d expect, or a rushing, or anything with such a shhhh. Hush. We’ll be interrupted. I’ll be hyperextended and impossible—this strange star of limbs and hinges like something that could stand up on its own, yanking double-handed on all my cords and tendons, yellow-white if you bite into them, popping, those rickety rubber stalks full of the code that makes me go. Code that opens my mouth. Speaks me. Is it miracle-proof? God sent a messenger to say, Believe her. And would do it again, would do it in a heartbeat. All we do is stay in the foreground, we bend low, we write it down.
Emma De Lisle’s recent work is out or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Boiler, Denver Quarterly, Image, The Missouri Review, Washington Square Review, and West Branch. She lives in Western Massachusetts and is co-editor of Mark.
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