My Pulse on a Platter, by Lindy Giusta

Prose, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

“My Pulse on a Platter is a collection of prose poem / micro-essays / hybrid narrative of a well-oiled mind bent on crucial examination of emotional history that plays well with the author’s battle cry. Illness stations itself, and we steady ourselves against it.

The author’s seepage is a deep denim mark and full-bodied curation of a beautiful temperance that I’d like to perform a metaphor on: a dinner party table. Great helpings of taper candles set stylishly in garnet-colored glass, and the scramble of half-completed dinner before sudden recall to another room… the party-goers’ ghosts play at their corporeal absence with oil pastels, and, similarly to Lindy, mark passage from room and emotional portal through intelligent illustrations. The forks vying for idiosyncraticity are heavy silver and the meat’s tender like the inside of a just-kissed mouth, and the scene’s a live-action embalming of the terrified love of womanhood set sickly against patriarchal crucifixions. Lindy’s writing fashions the watery pressure of past-midnight prose and queer yearning, culminating in a successful orchestra anchored by the hemorrhage of an Evangelical Christian upbringing. The transmogrification Lindy attempts at story-telling her trauma into letter-bound spirit breaks exits towards the clusters of pain in the corner of the heart that bears witness to a child’s lacings into Culture that sanctifies uniformity.

Lindy performs a boxer’s quick, loose punches on a sentence, while petitioning fervently for salvation through romance… [its worship and excrement of shadow-self]. The artist doesn’t die but is reborn as word logician of the sweetest, bloodied power.

Something new happens and the transformation stays by your bedside, daily. The brain’s damnation is credited with the parietal cortex’s drag show of past pain made edible to the soul. The book’s got a pulse, and my first impulse is to pray.”

—Mary Buchanan Sellers

Lindy Giusta is a queer, neurodivergent passionate visual artist and writer hailing from San Diego. They have shown their art and writing in various lit mags and when not creating they love playing mandolin, reading, delving into adventures and always drinking copious amounts of coffee.