Description
Blood Box, the deliciously haunting debut short collection from poet Zefyr Lisowski, takes us inside the infamous 1892 axe murders of Abby and Andrew Borden through twenty-six wide-ranging, stylistically experimental persona poems. Lisowski re-introduces us to mythologized spinster Lizzie Borden as we’ve never seen her before: a girl wielding an axe, yes, but also a girl trapped-in the boxes of age, of hunger, of loneliness, of blame. Lizzie, who was acquitted of the double murder of her father and stepmother, yet continues to haunt our cultural psyche over a hundred years later. Even now, “Violence dances with us like ghosts.”
In these pages, the notorious crime and its cast of characters serve as a jumping-off point for a textured exploration of inherited violence, queer intimacy, and the way family can be “another geometry, another violence too.” Blood Box is Lizzie’s story, but it’s also the story of grief, of selfhood, of trans and queer becoming. Lisowski’s Lizzie Borden is as sweet, sad, spooky, and haunted as a girl with an axe ever can be.
SKETCHES FOR A FAMILY PORTRAIT,
August 1, 1892
Lizzie
Is all this grief repetitive to you?
I see my stepmother and look at a straw creature.
I see my uncle, fresh from the long expanse
of Iowa,
and there are only shadows, heaps of luggage.
I’m spending more and more time in the barn-
its stifle, scratch and warp of floor. From there,
I can see the plyboard of our home, plump droop of
pear tree. Violence dances with us like ghosts. Uncle John’s
voice booming over our evening meal. This family
filthens me. When trying to escape, I close
my eyes and think of Massachusetts’ rocky
coast-which I’ve only seen once, its seaboard
a slate as silver-grey as my father’s dry eyes. Its shore
salty as the coat he hangs up grimed
by the completion of each day’s errands.
This is our intimacy, the bond we keep:
I always pass by before he climbs the back stairs.
I am careful to avoid eye contact.
He is careful to keep the door locked afterward.
© NM Esc 
