Emma De Lisle ’15
Alumnae Poet
Biography
Emma De Lisle studies religion at Harvard and serves as Associate Editor of Peripheries. She has been a finalist for YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize, Frontier Poetry’s Open Prize, and the Los Angeles Review Poetry Award. Her recent poems are out or forthcoming in, among others, Image, West Branch, The Boiler, and The Adroit Journal.
Select Poems
It was not silent, of that we can be certain. Even were each
ear cut from us, we could tell you. Even were each mouth
lost to a kiss. It is amazing how quickly we became
experts. Even with our hair aflame, and our hearts
burning within us. The dead one? We cast lots. We told everyone
he hanged himself. We told everyone: we don’t know him.
It was in a field, that field he bought with the silver, it was
rightly his own. He stumbled. Broke himself open and spilled out
on the dirt, shining organs so caught in the late gold they were
like coals you could claim to walk on. Searing. Kissing the skin
off your arches. This is how it happened: there were still mink
and foxes. There were fig trees swaying, and figs. At that time
there was a breeze to sway in. A mule tied a few yards off, quiet, not
stamping, not twitching the flies from her thick hide. There were
flies, roiling orgies of them, lavish, and so close. There was a change
in tone. We remembered more. Addressed you by name. We found
that the mule had badly cut her knee—it must have been recent—
the large bulb still beating just above the cannon bone, split anew
when she walked. It pains us strangely to look, now. If it had been
a little lower. The wound. Down past the thick joint. Still,
four-legged thing, we might not remember you. Changeable
in the shade, the used bulk of the plow—a few flies, distracted
by the seams of dry fluid that glaze your leg. Latching, touching,
trying to drink. Again and again to drink.
Published in Denver Quarterly 58.1