Susan Lewis

In This Story
          after Notes for Echo Lake 3 by Michael Palmer

In this story the subject appears it never appears. Unkind as one another or some memory in kind, remembrance of things missed + missed remembrance, crimes paying (pained) in kind. Using those unused to leisure for your pleasure not theirs, moist lips of the other among others, ever hungry ever weary in this arid dearth of stim. Playing mistress may I til we drop. Holdlier than thou. Exhausperated. At land’s end, tunnel’s gawp or depth of plunge the dewy woman with her shining lobules, silent minders wet & wasted to await her waisted world. In this story there are lips there were lips + wan sips tipped on the cusp of consummation as it appears never appears.

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Until the Inevitable

may or may not transpire upon this bright, screaming water, this cloudy contoured breath, this lacerated need. While the Minions of Clarity deny your best contentions & misericord mangles your nose-ring of fire. Who else knows how to credit envy’s silk, spun so lushly from our spindly limbs? Or prepare for Mistress Ingenuity to cast a lucid glance or a necklace of questions. While Mr. Valor invites you to the Infinity Jamboree & Gomorrah languishes in the wallows of herstory. But whence, you wonder, sails Salubrity? — who won’t stop keening for her sweet & sour acolyte, moaning iambically in 3:4 time, dying for the glow of your remnant pulse.


Susan Lewis lives in New York City and edits Posit. Lewis is author of nine books and chapbooks, most recently Heisenberg’s Salon (BlazeVOX, 2017), This Visit (BlazeVOX, 2015), How to be Another (Cervena Barva Press, 2014), and State of the Union (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in a great number of journals and anthologies, including The Awl, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Cimarron, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, Prelude, Pool, Raritan, Seneca Review, So to Speak, Verse, Verse Daily, and VOLT. Links to reviews, interviews, and online work can be found at www.susanlewis.net.