Afterfeast

Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast explores Mediterranean superstition, the spiritual complexities of Judaism, and the undersung erotics of lesbian intimacy with a daunting omniscience, moving from past to present, from real city to mythical terrain, from lyric speaker to shifting persona. As the opening poem, “Pastoral” begins: 

It doesn’t have to be 
something that happened to us
for me to write it. 

What “happens” and to whom it is happening is secondary to Hiton’s breathtaking irreality, a modernist decoupling of time and space that allows the reader to almost slip out of a poem into some other dimension only to be resurrected in a lake, Boston, a Japanese tree, a lover. “I am ill with history” says the speaker in “Lethargy,” for whom the light that leaves her lover’s face becomes a “magnifying glass / over the smooth hard body / in which I cannot exit.” Illness for Hiton means body-as-prison, an embodiment that is relentless and rigorous, as in these lines from the poem “Mise en Abyme”:

Because the sky was
cloudless, I couldn’t be sure
which element drenched my skin,
unbearable organ.

Yet in other poems, the speaker experiences a free-wheeling consciousness writ all over the walls: “I saw / The streets before they were streets. I knew darkness as itself.” Greece and the Aegean Sea serve as touchstones for the poet, with sea air, chickens on a spit, and thyme and citrus elevating the poet’s devouring (“There was an Entire Chicken”). Hiton also maps how Sapphic desire, self-similitude, and clandestine (often unconscious) devotion operate when women love women. “I thought I wanted a sister / What I wanted was a lover,” says the speaker in the closing lines of “Pastoral.” We read in one poem: “The figures begin as pawns, are revived as queens,” and in another the poet gazes at the breasts of a beloved in her bathing suit as the butter is “burning in the pan.” Desire is both subdued and regal, sisterly and erotic, and somehow, even with unresolved longing between lovers, there is always fellowship in the multiplying of queens.