"Thursday, the Vampire's Wife" Kill the pig, you eat its flesh To kill is to defile but to honour is to eat. Don’t waste, don’t waste, don’t waste. Give me your vampire kiss, the one that consumes me like a raging fire. Promise to be thorough, promise to be rough, promise to keep your promise just this once. Let it burn as it runs. I’ve never tasted a purer hope. One that tells me that the castles won’t be empty, and the crows won’t fly as long as I clip their wings, as long as I roam the halls, keep the candles lit. As long as I, I , I— no "you", no "we". Is it just me? I beg of you, can you see? Where is the infection going and where did it start? I’ve worn numbness like a blanket and now I fear it’s reached my heart. My mother called and said she didn’t know me, and I said: “You only know my teeth” not the ones I carry with me, but the ones that spilled out, the ones you keep. They should invent a summer that’s bearable. Not crushing, not fawning, not yearning, not longing, not crushing on you. Every poem I write is about hunting, is a hunt, and sometimes life is like that too. Truth be told, most days I am pure emotion but not in a way that feels. The sickness is too far advanced for that. Like a dog nipping at my heels. Terminally ill but beautiful still, so there’s no use in mourning. On the phone, mid afternoon, no, not in the morning, “Strawberries and cream”, you told me. We were talking castles and journeys and summer heat, Fresh fruit and caskets. Continued my longstanding tradition of making notes when people speak, even if it’s all imagined. Somewhere in the house something is buzzing, somewhere across the street a phone rings. The vampire’s wife lives as a housefly because I left my blood-stained dishes in the sink.
Or, listen to the official performance of this poem here, as spoken in St. Michael’s Paternoster Royal church, the City of London, in late June of this year (my first time performing my poetry!).
Sabrina Angelina is dedicated to the intersection of love and violence, a term she coined to describe classical Romanticism's tendency to pair passion and suffering, tragedy and pleasure, together. Consumed by this concept, she writes on Substack and curates a White Lily Society Instagram page dedicated to arts and culture. In September 2020, she released her debut poetry collection “a Cult of Butterflies”- a pandemic project about longing, nostalgia, and her teenage self’s very first steps in poetry.
White Lily Society links // Sabrina Angelina links
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