Flowers from a New Love after the Divorce
Cut back the stems an inch to keep in bloom.
So instructs the florist’s note
enclosed inside the flowers.
Who knew what was cut
could heal again, the green wounds close,
stitching themselves together?
It doesn’t matter. The flowers, red
and white, will bloom awhile, then wither.
You sit in an unlit room and watch
the vase throw crystal shadows through the dark.
The flowers’ colors are so lovely they’re painful.
In a week, you’ll have to throw them out.
It’s only hope that makes you take out scissors,
separate each bloom and cut
where you last measured. Did you know
Venus was said to turn into a virgin
each time she bathed? She did it
as a mark of love. She did it
so as to please her lovers. Perhaps,
overwhelmed by pain,
she eventually stopped bathing
altogether. It doesn’t matter. It’s a pleasure
to feel the green nubs stripped, watch the stems
refresh under your blade. They’re here
because they’re beautiful. They glow
inside your crystal vase. And yet
the flowers by themselves are nothing:
only a refraction of color that,
in a week or two, will be thrown out.
Day by day, the water lowers. The red-
and-white heads droop, blacken at the stems.
It doesn’t matter. Even cut stems heal.
But what is the point of pain if it heals?
Some things should last forever, instructs
the florist’s note. Pleasure,
says one god. Shame, says another.
Venus heads, they call these flowers.
In a week or two, you’ll lose the note,
have to call the florist up.
With sympathy, you’ll think he says.
Perhaps: With love. It doesn’t matter.
You’ve stopped bathing. Alone,
you sit before the crystal
vase refracting you in pieces
through the dark. You watch
the pale skin bloom inside it, wither.
You petal, inch by inch.
You turn red and white together.
PAISLEY REKDAL
from Animal Eye. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
CARRYING TWO PACKS
She appeared on the platform of the Seventh Street Subway
a large pack on her back and another hung in front,
a young woman carrying two hiking packs looking for a northbound train.
And I remember a love of many years ago when a young woman
told me that we would never meet again, so I had taken to a high trail
hiking, clawing, pulling, dragging my way above timber line
seeking the widest vision that I could contain to fill this emptiness,
up, up, ever higher toward the uttermost peak, to the summit until a
darkening blue black sky revealed a breathtaking view of another world
promontories, rocks, deep ravines, gashed open slides, stretching forever
among an oncoming night.
My hollowness filled with the greatness of it all until satisfied
I stampeded down the mountain into darkening forest shadows
like a wild animal only to grasp that I had left my pack far above.
Whether to make perilous return or walk on and in that frozen moment
another person appeared on the high trail,
a young woman carrying two packs, one on her back and one slung before
and though I could not see her face I knew it was the one who had said,
“We shall never meet again” and this dream has spoken for our love,
repeating, returning, rerunning again and again until now I understand
what she has done for me.
David T. Strong
I Wanted To Write It For You
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
Did you come here to be with yourself?
Did you finish that day you couldn’t begin?
That’s not what was written but what I came to ask.
I wanted to live with you.
I wanted to know where you leave yourself
and who you live inside.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
I wanted to call you, I wanted to hear
just you. Talking. To me.
I wanted to see your mouth move.
I wanted to write you.
A novel, no letter.
Do you understand?
I wanted to write
without a beginning or end.
I wanted to write just the love part for you.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
Above a window. Near a fire escape.
Because we have no escape
I wanted to write it.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint
like I wanted to write it for you.
Just the love part.
That’s the only thing I wanted to write.
That’s what it says. Above a window.
Framed by a fire escape.
That’s what someone has written.
Just the love part.
There’s no plot. Nothing happens.
Nothing will happen in this poem.
Nothing much happens in life.
Nothing worth knowing about really.
Just the love part.
No beginning or end.
I wanted to write it for you.
Darling
The days fall out of your pockets one after the other.
Soon you’ll need a new jacket with tougher leather
and seams no one has felt. Soon you’ll bring
the old books into your bed and sleep easy
and alone. It must be December again.
This must be the part of the story where you
refuse to say how the bodies you’ve walked toward
continue walking in you. With heavy black boots
in a calm procession of darling and honey—
they walk up and down the narrow streets of your heart.
Alex Dimitrov
from Begging for It, 4 Way Books, 2013.
THE EASEMENT
Don’t ask how the buds are swelling
the moon’s got your address
& it’s got yours.
The nightgown’s got your shape
& your scent & I miss you.
I wrecked more than I knew I could
try to forget. What sad song to turn
the fuck up? Distract me from what
floor’s the elevator’s skipping, from
the un-greeted strangers or neighbors
attempting just a little unmet hello.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Poem for Haruko
I never thought I’d keep a record of my pain
or happiness
like candles lighting the entire soft lace
of the air
around the full length of your hair/a shower
organized by God
in brown and auburn
undulations luminous like particles
of flame
But now I do
retrieve an afternoon of apricots
and water interspersed with cigarettes
and sand and rocks
we walked across:
How easily you held
my hand
beside the low tide
of the world
Now I do
relive an evening of retreat
a bridge I left behind
where all the solid heat
of lust and tender trembling
lay as cruel and as kind
as passion spins its infinite
tergiversations in between the bitter
and the sweet
Alone and longing for you
now I do
June Jordan
from Directed by Desire, Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
Cosi
What god knew
to take her speech?
She never said
“I love you.” Not once.
She always used
her eyes.
Here is our circle. Dare not break this cloister of our own making, paper tent where no skins touch in the white darkness.
When, as you will, you leave me in the dust
someday, remember how I carved a heart
in the ice still whiting out half your rear
window, so when you looked back you’d recall
the heart I lost to you & you had left
behind, as you fought traffic down the road.
In point of fact, the heart you took in then
broke yours when it broke into tears that streaked
your vision of the distance you had come
from where I made the gesture you would find
etched on glass as if for good. My heart goes
with you, it said before it melted down
from its own heat as fast as my own words
give me the slip, black ice under my feet.
RANDY BLASING
Learning to Float
Relax. It’s like love. Keep your lips
moist and parted, let your upturned hands
unfold like water lilies, palms exposed.
Breathe deeply, slowly. Forget chlorine
and how the cement bottom was stained
blue so the water looks clear
and Caribbean. Ignore the drowned mosquitoes,
the twigs that gather in the net
of your hair. The sun is your ticket,
your narcotic, blessing your chin,
the floating islands of your knees.
Shut your eyes and give yourself
to the pulsating starfish, purple and red,
that flicker on your inner lids.
Hallucination is part of the process,
like amnesia. Forget how you learned
to swim, forget being told
Don’t panic. Don’t worry. Let go
of my neck. It’s only water. Don’t think
unless you’re picturing Chagall,
his watercolors of doves and rooftops,
lovers weightless as tissue,
gravity banished, the dissolving voices
of violins and panpipes. The man’s hand
circles the woman’s wrist so loosely,
what moors her permits her to float,
and she rises past the water’s skin,
above verandas and the tossing heads
of willows. Her one link to earth,
his light-almost reluctant-touch, is a rope
unfurling, slipping her past the horizon,
into the cloud-stirring current. This far up,
what can she do but trust he won’t let go?
April Lindner
from Skin, Texas Tech University Press.
Central Anatolia
We drove the honey road, a seller at each
curve with dark jars on shelves aslant, dark
sticky jars with lids screwed down, an afterthought.
The same six jars, same three shelves for miles
the same dense honey from centuries of bees
with furrowed brows, luscious dark of all the eyes,
veil dark until the angled sun cut amber through the glass
and we stopped and tasted slow thick beads of it
glowing down our throats. Next field over
the woman hefting marble on her back, Apollo’s
steps now the foundation of her hut, the jar
wrapped in paper in our trunk and then, remember
Konya? Walking backward in a hallway filled
with strangers all in reverse, we faced the holy
man’s remains until we left the filigree of his tomb,
shuffled out heels first, barefoot and there
was the carpet with tulips upside down, some colors
still breathing, springing back beneath our feet —
indigo preserves its wool, where walnuts’ brown
oxidizes, rots to the foundation so the woven
landscape changes over decades, growing
Plain Cotton Panties
for LLM
An old joke. That she’ll break out
the frayed ones. The unlovely ones
that sag in the seat. After the surge
everyone agrees the heart simmers;
you can say tata to sequins and lace.
The shy dance she danced, backlit
by the bathroom’s bulb, breasts
ensconced in an eye-and-hook number
you’ll lumber to undo, each eyelet
staring back, kiss that goodbye too.
That’s the joke of how love wanes.
I say, Watch me. I’ll take all the pairs
in equal measure. Give me bedhair
and morning breath. Dental floss
flung over the faucet. I want it all.
The danger’s to forget it matters
whose curves they ride snug or loose
against. The small of her back above
whatever waistline, unadorned
as new snow, that’s all the glitter
I want. To ease an ice chip across
the smooth swerve of her shoulders,
down her back, the cello of her hips.
As for you, panties of any cloth,
cut, or color, take off. The hamper,
the floor. It’s all the same to us.
We don’t need you anymore.
AUBADE
for K.A.
She will remember dark eyes
the scruff to his cheeks, slender arms and legs
a tattoo on his thigh, the sun
in all its passion, deep blue, pale flesh at the center
how the sound of her name was a new word
from his mouth
She will remember the scent of leather and sweet musk
the salt of his skin, his hand against her thigh
how she saw, more than heard him moan
the slight up-movement of his adams apple
the skin on his throat tight around it, his head tossed back
how he tasted his own passion, spilled on her skin
She will remember that he called her Goddess
the circle of his arms in the dark, the hum of the air conditioner
the sudden one-ness of a Vermont hotel room
her blossoming there in the comfortable blur of night
the sweetness of his mouth, the kiss, the drifting off
She will remember the morning
alcohol and music worn away to a dull headache
the shade opened, the light turned on
how he had already dressed
but found her, naked under the sheet
his soft voice
pressed into her neck,
and his whisper
that he wanted her
Again
Cheri L. Roberts
Reunion
I rehearse the moment
I’ll run into you unexpectedly on the street
and smile at you,
like you are not the place
my heart used to live.
Like you are not
still calling me home.
Elijah Patterson
thank you, punch-in-the-face-poetry
To Awaken with Her
To awaken with her, this dream
to begin days, days full and ripe
whose mornings already pour gold
just like this one, this, on which I dream,
and say to the gold in my window,
I finally understand you, when she lies by me
when I hold her, her breath
when my hands are once more sure
of what they must curve to hold,
to hold her form in the mornings, early,
when the days bear her soft name,
this gold reaches its goal.
I’d like to dream, dream for years,
study the alchemy of morning light,
and on those days that are fully ours,
not to awaken empty-handed.
Uwe Kolbe
