give me fire

A little Audre Lorde for a gloomy Saturday, and for my wife.

Give me fire and I will sing you morning
Finding you heart
And a birth of fruit
For you, a flame that will stay beauty
Song will take us by by the hand
And lead us back to light.

Give me fire and I will sing you evening
Asking you water
And quick breath
No farewell winds like a willow switch
Against my body
But a voice to speak
In a dark room.

—Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "A Lover's Song," from The First Cities (1968), and in this case from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (Norton, 1997).

ache for your life

I promised y'all some bangers.

I've been taught that bloodstones can cure a snakebite,
can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this
when the war ended. The war ended
depending on which war you mean: those we started,
before those, millennia ago and onward,
those which started me, which I lost and won—
these ever-blooming wounds.
I was built by wage. So I wage love and worse—
always another campaign to march across
a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin
settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.
I dismount my dark horse, bend to you there, deliver you
the hard pull of all my thirsts—
I learned Drink in a country of drought.
We pleasure to hurt, leave marks
the size of stones—each a cabochon polished
by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel
turning—green mottled red—
the jaspers of our desires.
There are wildflowers in my desert
which take up to twenty years to bloom.
The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand
until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them
in its copper current, opens them with memory—
they remember what their god whispered
into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.
Where your hands have been are diamonds
on my shoulders, down my back, thighs—
I am your culebra.
I am in the dirt for you.
Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,
two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash
before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood—
the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea.
Arise the wild heliotrope, scorpion weed,
blue phacelia which hold purple the way a throat can hold
the shape of any great hand—
Great hands is what she called mine.
The rain will eventually come, or not.
Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—
the war never ended and somehow begins again.

—Natalie Diaz, "Postcolonial Love Poem," from Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). I believe this poem was originally published (in a slightly earlier form) in The New Republic on February 19, 2016, and I've had it on my list for a while, possibly even since before the collection won a Pulitzer. Like I said, it's a banger.

every ocean is the same ocean

I am not one of nature's collectors, except when it comes to books, and especially when it comes to poetry books in the month of April. Whoops. I'm not mad about it, though! Books are great! Yesterday and today, Lucy and I went to a bunch of different local Houston bookstores and bought more books than we really should have (so many good things, though) in the name of Indie Bookstore Day and the Houston Book Crawl, which is on through the end of the month. They gave us a bingo card and everything! How were we supposed to resist? Anyway, this poem is not from any of the books I bought today, but it is from one of the poetry books we picked up when we were at the Strand in New York last week.

        for the occasion of a dear friends' wedding

Perhaps you've noticed
the way someone yawning
blooms a yawn in your own mouth
as though it were your idea
& not a hand me down,
the way an ocean wave
is not invented out of nothing, but
arrives from somewhere else,
sent from one shoreline of the lopsided planet
to another, so that every ocean
is the same ocean, no matter
what edge of it you are dipping your toes in.
You can stand on a cliff & watch a storm roll towards you,
passed around the globe like wet gossip,
one storm begetting another,
just as my middle school science teacher taught me
that matter cannot be created nor destroyed,
just shifted from one state to the next,
which is comforting on days you miss the dinosaurs
or need to be reminded that many people had to fall in love
with a face at least a little bit like yours
in order for yours to get here.
Maybe God had a good idea one time
& the rest has all been dominoes:
a thunderclap begets a hiccup begets an undertow begets
your certainty that a face was made for you to love it,
but ask the coral reef, who knows we are not good ideas
& definitely not new ones,
more like galactic putty smushed into human form,
who spend so much of our brief time here
losing sight of the storms we came from,
the weather that moves through us,
that we unleash on everyone else.
& who can blame us?
There is no shame in forgetting
that our atoms
once held together some other jellyfish,
when her cheek on your pillow makes your skin
too electric to be called anything but New.
When my grandmother was
nearing the end of her time in the body I knew her in,
she started to lose herself
memory first, but language close behind.
She misused words, mixed up phrases, said things incorrectly.
When she met someone,
instead of saying, it is a pleasure to meet you,
she would say,
it is a pleasure to love you.
She understood
that what feels unknown
is an opportunity for remembering.
In which case, in some future,
when two red-shouldered hawks
see each other for what they think is the first time,
they might suddenly recall
that there was once a day
when we traveled many miles,
some of us whole lifetimes,
so that we could meet you,
here, in love,
& what more evidence will they need
(what more evidence do you need?) to see
that it is
a sincere pleasure to love you
again & again.

—Sarah Kay, "Epithalamion," from A Little Daylight Left (The Dial Press, 2025). Sarah Kay is a slam poet, so I do recommend the video of this poem. For Lucy, obviously.

the improbable lady

I'm slightly more organized this year than I have been for the last few years of National Poetry Month, which means I have some real bangers coming up in the last week of the month. But I'm starting this week here, with Saeed Jones; I saw someone describe this poem as "heartbreakingly lovely," and it really is—I've had it on my list since I first read it at poetryisnotaluxury in 2023.

In this field of thistle, I am the improbable
lady. How I wear the word: sequined weight
snagging my saunter into overgrown grass, blonde
split-end blades. I waltz in an acre of bad wigs.

Sir who is no one, sir who is yet to come, I need you
to undo this zipped back, trace the chiffon
body I've borrowed. See how I switch my hips

for you, dry grass cracking under my pretend
high heels? Call me and I'm at your side,
one wildflower behind my ear. Ask me
and I'll slip out of this softness, the dress

a black cloud at my feet. I could be the boy
wearing nothing, a negligee of gnats.

—Saeed Jones, "Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown," from Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press, 2014).

going where I'm going

We're flying home today after a pretty great week of theatre and friends and birthdays (I am very tired but also very happy), so I'm posting this one from the airport. Too on the nose, or just on theme? Either way, Ada Limón never misses.

Every time I'm in an airport
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I'd be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe in
the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we're small and
flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I'm going, all over again.

—Ada Limón, "The Problem With Travel," from Bright Dead Things, 2015.

islands and lemons

This is a summer poem, and it's not actually that summery today. But it's also a New York City poem, and a love poem, and I've been wanting to post it while in New York for a while. We'll be down on Bleecker later tonight to see a show at the Lucille Lortel.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom
of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!

When I press summer dusks together, it is
a month of street accordions and sprinklers
laying the dust, small shadows running from me.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.
I would undress you in the summer heat,
and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

—Derek Walcott (1930-2017), "Bleecker Street, Summer," from Collected Poems: 1948-1984 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).

as if the tempest thirsted for the rain

No poem for yesterday because I have been having too much fun?! WE'VE BEEN BUSY. Since arriving in New York, we have seen four shows, been to the Met and the Bronx Zoo, and seen many friends, and I am very tired and may need a vacation from my vacation. Tonight is the first night of Passover, though, so here is a poem that is just a little bit for that.

Night, and the heavens beam serene with peace,
Like a pure heart benignly smiles the moon.
Oh, guard thy blessed beauty from mischance,
This I beseech thee in all tender love.
See where the Storm his cloudy mantle spreads,
An ashy curtain covereth the moon.
As if the tempest thirsted for the rain,
The clouds he presses, till they burst in streams.
Heaven wears a dusky raiment, and the moon
Appeareth dead—her tomb is yonder cloud,
And weeping shades come after, like the people
Who mourn with tearful grief a noble queen.
But look! the thunder pierced night’s close-linked mail,
His keen-tipped lance of lightning brandishing;
He lovers like a seraph-conqueror.—
Dazed by the flaming splendor of his wings,
In rapid flight as in a whirling dance,
The black cloud-ravens hurry scared away.
So, though the powers of darkness chain my soul,
My heart, a hero, chafes and breaks its bonds.

—Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1022 to 1058-70), "Night-Piece," translated from Hebrew by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). The Academy of American Poets dates this poem to 1889, which is obviously posthumous for both Lazarus and ibn Gabirol, but it was published in The Poems of Emma Lazarus in Two Volumes, Vol. II Jewish Poems: Translations (Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1889). I read it for the first time when it was in Poem-a-Day on May 18, 2024.

accented in gold

It's a two-poem day! This is because yesterday was so absolutely jam-packed that I wasn't at my computer at all. We moved from the airport hotel at LGA to the hotel we're staying at in Manhattan, went to brunch, went to look at cherry blossoms in Central Park, and went to see Wicked. (Which was wonderful! It was Lucy's first time seeing the stage play and I hadn't seen it in like 20 years.) Then we went back to the hotel and Lucy ordered take-out and crashed and I went to dinner with friends and then walked most of the way back to the hotel like an idiot who hasn't lived in New York in over a year and is paying for this with very sore feet and legs today.

Anyway, I kept thinking about this poem while we were walking through Central Park, so here's Ana Božičević for April 9:

Everyone shivering in their
Leather jackets
Eating sandwiches named after
Serial killers
And in the middle of
All of it
Magnolia trees
Enough to make you
Stop and say

Fuck!

Super tenderly.

—Ana Božičević, "Spring 2," published in the NY Tyrant, July 5, 2018.

*

Today's poem is also a little for New York, of course. I really love this poem, and it was always going to be one of the first ones I posted for this week:

for Erika

i ask you what's the first thing you think about
when you see the color yellow & like a real
new yorker, you say yellow cabs. not sunlight
or a yellow ribbon tied around a vase of fresh begonias.
yellow cabs honking down Broadway. i still remember
the night we first shared a cab. you whispered
honey, whispered lace, whispered chrysanthemum.
all that practice & it turns out, i had never ridden
in a cab the right way around us the streetlights blurred
into yellow ribbons, & when you put your hand
on my thigh it was like i knew for the first time
why god gave us thighs. why god gave us hands.
maybe god invented yellow for the cabs,
so the first time we touched like this
it could be accented in gold.

—José Olivarez, "Love Poem Beginning with a Yellow Cab," from Promises of Gold (Macmillan, 2023).

we'll go winging

I woke up feeling like absolute garbage and it's going to be a very long day—our flight to New York for a week of theater and seeing friends (yay!) leaves Houston at 7pm and arrives at LGA a little before midnight. On the plus side, I also woke up thinking about this poem. So here's a little aspirational James Baldwin for today. I am hoping that the migraine meds work and the weather stays gorgeous and our travel is easy and painless, and I am also hoping for good things to come for all of us.

Let this be my summertime
Of azure sky and rolling sea,
And smiling clouds, and wind-kissed laughter,
And just myself entranced with thee.
And children playing in the glory
Of a carefree, youthful day,
And sunshine shining from the heavens,
And tears and sighing fled away.
Let this be my happiness
'Midst the earth's swift-flowing woe.
Let this be my only solace—
Just to know you love me so.
Just to know that we'll go winging,
Far above this earthy clime,
Hand in hand through laughing meadows.
Let this be my summertime.

—James Baldwin (1924-1987), "Paradise," from Magpie (Winter 1941).

creature of liminal spaces

And for today, April 13: Ada Limón. I borrowed K's copy of The Carrying to post this, since mine is back in Houston. I love this poem, and it's also one of like four or five poems on my "post this eventually" list that involves horses. We saw several horses on our drive to dinner tonight, and some of them were wearing COATS. (It's cold here.)

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That's how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn't a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

—Ada Limón, "What I Didn't Know Before," from The Carrying, 2018.

a little room in a house set aflame

The sonnet is my favorite poetic form. I can make a pretty good case for the villanelle, and in general poems that fuck with formalism often speak to me. But there's just nothing like a sonnet, and despite being a very tight form in many ways, it's so adaptable and can do so much. Here are (for April 7 and April 9) two very different sonnets.

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold
While your better selves watch from the bleachers.
I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow
You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night
In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-
Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars
Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

—Terrance Hayes, "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin ["I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison"]" from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, 2018, and originally published in Poetry magazine, 2017.

*

Amor, de grano a grano, de planeta a planeta,
la red del viento con sus países sombríos,
la guerra con sus zapatos de sangre,
o bien el día y la noche de la espiga.

Por donde fuimos, islas o puentes o banderas,
violines del fugaz otoño acribillado,
repitió la alegría los labios de la copa,
el dolor nos detuvo con su lección de llanto.

En todas las repúblicas desarrollaba el viento
su pabellón impune, su glacial cabellera,
y luego regresaba la flor a sus trabajos.

Pero en nosotros nunca se calcinó el otoño.
Y en nuestra patria inmóvil germinaba y crecía
el amor con los derechos del rocío.


Love, from seed to seed, from planet to planet,
the wind with its net through the darkening nations,
war with its bloody shoes,
or even the day, with a thorny night.

Wherever we went, islands or bridges or flags,
there were the violins of the fleeting autumn, bullet-laced;
happiness echoing at the rim of the wineglass;
sorrow detaining us, with its lesson of tears.

Through all those republics the wind whipped—
its arrogant pavillions, its glacial hair;
it would return the flowers, later, to their work.

But no withering autumn ever touched us.
In our stable place a love sprouted, grew:
as rightfully empowered as the dew.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XXVIII from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

on the moon

Yesterday, Lucy and I drove to Austin and back, not to see the eclipse, but to see two wonderful friends of mine who happened to be there! They're in town for a couple of weeks, but we leave for New York and Boston on Friday and they leave Texas the same day we get back, so this was the only weekend we could manage. But we made it work, and I am so, so glad we did. Friends are so good!!

It was a long day, though, and by the time we got home I was way too tired to post a poem, even though we did go to Book People in Austin and I did buy like five new poetry books. I'll post a poem for yesterday at some point, but here is a poem for today, total solar eclipse day:

not back, let's not come back, let's go by the speed of
queer zest & stay up
there & get ourselves a little
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean
i was already moonlighting
as an online moonologist
most weekends, so this is the immensely

logical next step, are you
packing your bags yet, don't forget your
sailor moon jean jacket, let's wear
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter,

queerer moon gravity, let's love each other
(so good) on the moon, let's love
the moon
on the moon

—Chen Chen, "i love you to the moon &," originally published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day on May 31, 2021 and just an absolute and utter delight. Is it too cloudy to see the eclipse here? Yes. Do I care? No. It's still eclipse day! Let's love each other on the moon.

and the moonbeams kiss the sea

Here's a classic for y'all tonight:

The fountains mingle with the river
    And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
    With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
    All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
    Why not I with thine?—

See the mountains kiss high heaven
    And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
    If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
    And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
    If thou kiss not me?

—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), "Love's Philosophy." I haven't posted any Shelley since "Ozymandias" in 2009, which is kind of bonkers, but it is also fundamentally true that Percy is the inferior Shelley. Mary 100% all the way.

spill your wine

And for today, April 29:

Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me

the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.

Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.

That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it

tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.

—Ellen Bass, "Basket of Figs," from Mules of Love, 2002.

down to our roots

Can you guys believe we got all the way to April 26 without me posting Neruda? Yeah, me neither. For L, of course.

Amor, cuántos caminos hasta llegar a un beso,
qué soledad errante hasta tu compañía!
Siguen los trenes solos rodando con la lluvia.
En Taltal no amanece aún la primavera.

Pero tú y yo, amor mío, estamos juntos,
juntos desde la ropa a las raíces,
juntos de otoño, de agua, de caderas,
hasta ser sólo tú, sólo yo juntos.

Pensar que costó tantas piedras que lleva el río,
la desembocadura del agua de Boroa,
pensar que separados por trenes y naciones

tú y yo teníamos que simplemente amarnos,
con todos confundidos, con hombres y mujeres,
con la tierra que implanta y educa los claveles.


Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss,
what loneliness-in-motion, toward your company!
Rolling with the rain we follow the tracks alone.
In Taltal there is neither daybreak nor spring.

But you and I, love, we are together
from our clothes down to our roots:
together in the autumn, in water, in hips, until
we can be alone together—only you, only me.

To think of the effort, that the current carried
so many stones, the delta of Boroa water;
to think that you and I, divided by trains and nations,

we had only to love one another:
with all the confusions, the men and the women,
the earth that makes carnations rise, and makes them bloom.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), II from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

ponytails

I stand corrected: there are good poems about soccer. eccentric_hat (who has exceptional taste in poetry) shared this one with me and it is so good that I need to post it today! But since it is quite short, and because I feel like it, I am posting a second poem, which is also short (and gay) and packs a punch.

girls' soccer practice:
they are running so hard
and shouting so strong with
ponytails ponytails ponytails
backlit and leaping
they are not afraid of you

—Jenna Jaco, "11/8/16," published in the Sweet Tree Review (Summer 2017, Volume 2, Issue III).

*

And if I cannot speak of my love—
if I do not speak about your hair, your lips, your eyes;
yet your face that I keep within my soul,
the sound of your voice that I keep within my brain,
the days of September that dawn in my dreams,
mold and color my words and phrases,
in whatever theme I get into, whatever idea I utter.

—C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), "December 1903," translated by Rae Dalven; this is one of Cavafy's unpublished poems.

again and again

A little tiny Rilke for y'all tonight:

Again and again, even though we know love's landscape
and the little churchyard with its lamenting names
and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others
end: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again
among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), "Again and again, even though we know love's landscape," from Uncollected Poems, translated by Edward Snow (1996).

the fire we gather between us

Okay, look. The thing is, I absolutely cannot go through the whole month of April here in 2022, year of the gay pirates (although if I had my way, every year would be the year of the gay pirates), without posting a poem with the literal title, "Love Pirates." Had I read this poem before I searched the Poetry Foundation archive for "pirates"? I had not. Am I into it anyway? I am. Love pirates, love love pirates.

I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle
under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing
into your hair and thinking of nothing. I want
to lie down with you under the sails of a wooden sloop
and drift away from all of it, our two cars rusting
in the parking lot, our families whining like tame geese
at feeding time, and all the bosses of the earth
cursing the traffic in the morning haze.

They will telephone each other from their sofas
and glass desks, with no idea where we could be,
unable to picture the dark throat
of the saxophone playing upriver, or the fire
we gather between us on this fantail of dusty light,
having stolen a truckload of roses
and thrown them into the sea.

—Joseph Millar, "Love Pirates," from Overtime, 2001. Who is more likely to throw a truckload of roses into the sea, do you think, Ed or Stede?

love wide open

All I have to say about this poem is that it is a fucking incredible poem for so, so many OTPs. (I actually went to Marge Piercy thinking about Passover poems, but then I got sidetracked because, like, yeah. Yeah.)

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

—Marge Piercy, "To have without holding" from The Moon is Always Female, 1980.

like the garden

A poem for the last night of vacation, and also, because it is Amy Lowell, for lesbians everywhere.

A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.

—Amy Lowell (1874-1925), "The Garden by Moonlight," from Pictures of the Floating World, 1919. (Also, I miss my black cats.)