Poetry Suite by Steve Subrizi
“the kiss of the devil
is pressed in a book”
Poetry by Steve Subrizi
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THE FOLLOWING IS BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS
A huddle of teens with a secluded cabin all their own;
a guest room upstairs, unused for decades, decked
with tidy frills and storied tchotchkes, quiet quiet quiet;
a book of horrendous spells to belt out loud for kicks;
an ancient mirror that unhides our blockloads of dead;
an empty mall full of empty stores on an empty highway;
sagitta magicka; aer capturae; suspiria;
the dream you had of you and me old and holding hands
on a beach—and then the swift dissonant swell of daybreak.
Now our tender world combusts into bludgeons and shields;
now we have to hammer all our scrap wood across our doors.
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DEVIL’S KISS (1976)
bereaved, we agree to a farce / we smirk
all night at the boringest party / crickets
blackened in the pan / wobble of the needle
sipping on well-gin for overdrive / sunk deep
in the bricks of the corner
but woe unto
the naysayers of the séance / the medium
grows tenser than the lines of a drawbridge
soul like a crass chandelier / dripping gleam
on some sore pink crowns
a harpsichord
plunking sure footsteps / whirling ghoulish
round the snack table / beneath all that lattice,
an old dream of revenge / a body that lasts
like the first Chanukah
spirit so heavy
from a small amount of oil / I slew two roosters
and welcomed you home / now our dead wish
treks up roped-off stairs / the kiss of the devil
is pressed in a book
glamour shots in a chainmail
negligee / a thawed-out heart bursting beneath it
tacky as an organ score / too embarrassed for porn
and re-cut as a slasher / don’t reanimate this love or
it will strangle all your friends
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MR. SARDONICUS (1961)
The last inbound train finds the skyline replaced
by a crudely blackwashed cyc. Please stand far back
from this crocodile, this clown with bowls of leeches
for eyes, a mouth pried violent by the dark.
Canned reverb instead of a voice. Fed on brandy
and the juice of red meat. A poison and a cure
take the same form. Visitors get boiled down
to medicine. The ailment inspires the ghoul
to assume its Latin name. The threat of an afterlife
glares like a mirror in the morning. Earth’s
ugliest children weave their roots into your graves.
They never shot an ending where the villain didn’t starve.
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CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)
The organist screamed in the empty church.
God followed her at every turn. Even the Greyhound
was full of the damned, and a strange mouth
smiled in the Utah sky. At the wholesale outlet,
the staff waltzed past. Smiling men followed her
at every turn. She rented a room on the peak
of a dark flight of stairs. The antique mirror was full
in the night. She left her car in Kansas at the bottom
of the river. She drove her car the way she played the organ.
Church for her was a place of business. Customers
would follow her like clouds in the sky.
That pavilion had stayed unlit for so many years,
when she turned on the lights a neighbor called the cops.
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Header image courtesy of Dr. Pavloff. To view is photo essay, "Aquatic Invasions," go here.
Steve Subrizi is a poet and singer-songwriter from New England who has performed his work in lecture halls and dive bars across America. He co-hosts the Boston Poetry Slam at Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of one e-chapbook, Newly Wild Hedgehog (NAP 2011), and his poems have appeared in such places as Neon, Muzzle, PANK, and The Scrambler. An e-chapbook of his horror movie poems, More Room In Hell, will be published by FreezeRay this fall, and his second studio album, Evil Beds, is also due out this October. For further reading and listening, please visit him: here.