2022—Do you know how much I love you?
walk at kaw point
WINNING SUBMISSION
Abiquiu
My alone is held here
In the red arms of your dirt
Layers of sediment and sage wrap me in a specific scent
I miss in the Midwest.
Everyone who knows you intimately
Knows your smell, beggaring description.
Returning to your wind on the road triggers tears of relief.
I roll down the window to let it run through me,
My fine hair a rusty nest,
Wet cheeks blown dry and quick in the desert.
The sun at your summits rings with hearty reminders–
Fossilized memories indelibly etched in me
Of freedom and versions of us.
A first kiss on the chalky Todilto Formation–
Sweat cooling, shoulders baking;
Mud fights in the arroyo
reeking of unrecognized sexual tension;
Spontaneous and sketchy tatts
Drawn in our skin at an Espanola strip mall;
Stolen beer and fire-roasted locusts;
A folk song’s call and response;
Broken bottles on a mesa I think I’m the first to climb;
Naked plunges in your reservoir, moonbathing;
Dawn meditation at your monastery.
The tears who accompany me
On the road back to humid flatlands
Take their damn time to evaporate.
But I have learned more of mesas and valleys
Since my first enchantment.
And part of loving is yearning.
RUNNERS UP
I’m never alone with you.
I’m never without a hand to hold or a mouth
to press against my own.
I think that we’re made from the same
stardust, the way that we fit perfectly together,
the way I know our souls are in mirror image
of each other’s
But at the barest level. We are two bodies
that will never get close enough. Two souls
isolated simply by the smallest molecules
Between our flush skin.
I yearn to sink my soul into yours, to let them
Tangle and intertwine, so I push my fingertips
against your skin and will the floodgates of your
soul to open.
If we all die alone, all die hidden inside our
minds where the world can’t reach us, then I
am glad that my soul, either by design or by habit, has
molded to yours,
I am glad that if my soul is alone, it will always be alone with yours.
when the flag is at half-mast i hope the president has died
when the flag is at half-mast i hope the president has died
& all the animals have escaped from the zoo
wall street is on fire
& congress too
a nation in mourning
from a debt collector flu
when the flag is at half-mast
i hope our love’s on the news
PUBLISHED SUBMISSIONS
1.
When I was much younger I believed that there was something so special about liquids in the way they were able to pass through things, to soak into things. My grandmother once warned me that our skin was the biggest thinnest sheet of sponge, like a piece of tissue on an oil spill, that it absorbs absolutely everything. At first it started with putting myself into bodies of water: my face under a bath, my toes on riverstones, my fingers inside someone else’s mouth. Later on I developed a habit of pressing my cheek against whoever I fell asleep with, and at one point it got so bad I could not sleep by myself unless I taped my own hand to my face. I have memorized the scents of a thousand shampoos. There is something so alchemic about liquids. I thought that to truly understand someone you needed to drink them, or they needed to drink you. So as I sobbed with Ariel knelt in front of me, I took their hands and placed them on my throat, and I began to speak. Thoughts, unlike nymphs, are not living creatures.
2.
I thought of you as I lay on a blanket in the outfield,
maple trees roaring with a June breeze,
generously sweeping the solstice-y heat from my exposed bits.
“This is nice,” I thought after I left you a message
offering that you only call me back if you want.
I want you to feel unburdened by my love;
To know it’s there and
to let it add a layer of moisture to your love for self.
May grace beget grace.
I want to export this feeling of ease and whimsy,
May rest nudge her way back to you.
I can’t tell if this is a poem about rest or love.
Why not both?
Rest reveals all of the nooks where my love for you collects while we’re apart.
It reminds me to bathe in the persistence and abundance of our lives together, apart.
I’ve decided rest is a pro-social evolutionary imperative
and I’ll tell you that the next time I’m with you.
You’ll say “Awww,”
Like you don’t quite believe me.
That’s fine.
I know my quiet, insistent love rests in your nooks, too.
You’ll find us in the crowd of the day-to-day
I trust.
See you there, friend.
3.
(not a poem) A Love Note to the Santa Monica Mountains
There is a pull toward you
Looking at small scabs on the arm from paper cuts in the east, I feel a pull toward you
It reminds me of you, these scabs, of the marks you would leave on my body
and I would have to explain to people that I cut brush so our home will not burn
I want to be there cutting your thickness again
Your oak, your sage, your Manzanitas
All together we call you chaparral
Your ancient blonde rocks, your dry lushness, your
low woody canopy
I know you don’t care about the cutting, the ‘me’ being there – but I do, it is all I think about sometimes
You doing your dry, twisting, indifferent thing and me there wrestling with you, overcoming the potential for you to catch fire
A feeling one lives with there
I wrestled with you down the mountain, year after year after year, you will never really hear me, this is also a feeling one lives with there
-Jan. 2022
4.
Not yet summer enough for sand to burn bare soles of feet
But summer plenty to roast shoulders left un-sunscreened
Bobble-headed and barely seven, I’m scooping up seashells and
thumbing where their residents used to be.
Cowrie, hermit crab, clamshell
Eiffel 65’s blue (Da-ba-dee-abba-die)
Looping unconsciously
through
every
t i n y
scene
Until a silence comes,
something big
Underneath the water
A school of manta rays
surfing the glass-clear waves
Big as, blue as, airplanes
I can hardly catch my breath
in time to say
“Mama!!! Look!”
Before they’d ridden the current away.
As powerful as it had been brief,
If I had blinked we would have missed it.
But I’d already closed a clamshell around
that cerulean memory
The gulf wanted us to see.
5.
I’ve fallen in love with each breath
I took in a new direction
My love has taken many forms
A color not invented yet, tall
Always a new branch to climb
Mating beneath the underflow
Great love rests before the fall
Takes time to learn the names
Of all the ways we need to hear
Grace, the abandon we remember
Love has never been about me
6.
In my dreams I know of love. The ground rumbles, I gather your body and rush to the top of the tree. A cloaked snail races up behind me and nudges my eyelids. Paper planes spin slowly out of control and in a cosmic fashion, someone knocks at the door.
I know of love. We hold hands in a field of flowers, the color sucked out of them. He tells me he’s leaving me, I feel loss. I rob a pawn shop down the street, he twirls. We make our way through a house of endless rooms, spinning as the color comes back.
I know of love. A woman soaks in a bath of chamomile and needles. The water is soft, I kiss her toes. Her eyes crinkle and her callus brushes against my forehead. We steal a car and drive to the edge of the earth, just in time for the cadenza. Our joints crack, an elegy in action.
7.
The smell of lilacs. Estate sales. The right side of the bed. Hot coffee in bed every morning. A print studio. Many, many houseplants. Walking around campus as the leaves are changing. Miles long summer bike rides. Talking about letterpress. Kevin Devine concerts. Rocky Votolato living room shows. Bremelo Press in Seattle, Washington. Reading books to my nieces. Listening to people tell me about their passions. Flat farmland as far as you can see. 1812 Church St. 52 Church Ave. 12 Miles and 45 minutes away. Skipping stones in every body of water I visit. The Great Lakes. Cafe tables on a sidewalk in Greece. That restaurant near the park in Stockholm. My red sweatshirt. Bringing coffee to work for a friend. A friend bringing coffee to work for me. Long stretches of empty city blocks. Abe Lebewohl Triangle, where Stuyvesant Street meets East 10th Street. Fuel Coffee on 19th Ave East. 1 pm lunch breaks for sandwiches and Vietnamese Coffee. Early morning grocery store trips. The smell of cookies fresh from the oven. Sitting in comfortable silences. Late night drives home from concerts. Driving someone to the airport. Reading before falling asleep. Never showing up somewhere empty handed.
8.
The night I fell out of love with you, I heard my neighbor hit his girlfriend. I wondered if I really wanted to end it because I couldn’t stomach the idea of being across the wall from that, alone.
And as I sit here listening to a sobbing woman tell the police everything is fine, I wonder how much she loves him, and how much she loves herself.
I’ve lain with monsters and entrusted my heart with people who casted it aside. I’ve wilted many times, becoming a smaller, scarred version of myself all in the name of love. At what cost do we continue on this journey of finding and keeping love?
A song said “love is watching someone die”. And though I often times find myself caught in a dark premonition of death unaccompanied, I’m not sure it’s worth staying with you or being that woman across the wall because we are afraid of life, and death, alone. Love isn’t just watching someone die, love is dying as a whole self.
9.
I'm already in love with you, and I haven't told you yet.
Who knows if I ever will?
(I think we've been here before)
I'm checking my phone constantly, wanting your words to fill my mind.
(I want you inside me in any way possible.)
I literally ache for you.
You're incredibly full of a zest that I can't get enough of - curious, insightful, wry, commanding.
I pour praise on you as a show of affection. How can I show you I love you without kissing you from head to toe?
10.
I love you enough to keep you physically safe…
But not enough to keep you mentally sound.
I see the red flags…
And walk towards them.
Hand select the ones who will destroy you as if self love is modern warfare.
This road is filled with land mines, planted by your own mind.
You know what awaits, but there is no other choice.
Take the path less traveled they say,
So, you turn your insomnia into poetry and wait for relief to wash over you.
Because in this day and age it’s…
Destroy yourself or someone else.
— love and mental illness
11.
I have these men that I love.
They’re on this high pedestal.
I know none of them deserve me.
One knows how to make my world quiver.
The other sees into my soul and calls me out on my bullshit.
And the third?
Well, I love him the most.
He sees my shattered soul, and hands me the pieces I’m meant to collect to rebuild.
That is his only purpose,
But he’s the one I hope stays.
My three (wise) men.
12.
The voice on the phone.
"You've been searching for your best friend all your life and here I am."
"Do you remember those Hollywood dopes who were running a sex cult. You can be my lead mistress."
"I called you last night you shit and you had me blocked. Shameful."
"You appear less and less self aware to me as we go on. Is this because you're more and more emotionally invested in me?
"Nah, you're doing what I tell you one way or another."
"I'm good at making you love me so it masks some of my deficiencies."
"I already know you're mine should I ever want you "
"How much time out of the day would you say you devote to thoughts about me?"
"You vacillate between loving me and hating me so easily. That's how you know it's real."
"I need you to always view me as perfect."
"Tell me you've never loved anyone the way you love me. That no one could break your heart as bad as I could. Tell me I'm the one."
You know exactly how much I love you.
13.
The bargain of being needed
Is sharing time beyond yourself
It’s a promise to the future
Entrusted in mutual wealth
And the burden is a cross, too
Thrust into your arms
Facing martyrdom, thusly
If you bear the responsibility
Of rising to the occasion
And sure,
one’s proximity to greatness
Can be surface-level at best,
But the freedom to lean on Friendly shoulders
Does let one grow in rest
A prairie of tall plants, unable to stand upright on their own.
The rest, too, is a propensity
For showing others exposed belly
Fears are free to become Friendly soul-jerks
When you lie together, in bed
Or lie together, in your heads
The good kind of lies, like-- “We can make it if we really try”
“If we listen, learn, and love,
Even if time flies
We’ll make it fly right
And hold our heart steady
To trust being needed
And see our own sight”
14.
and i thought love was a distant galaxy
surrounded by dancing giants
intertwined and eloped
but i
a humble servant to despair
could not fathom to interrupt
the matrices of their rolling hills
yet
you
so easily
so kindly
pulled the clouds around me
condensed the remnants of my licorice heart
into your celestite hands
and melted me
in a hundred thousand instances
you and i are the most beautiful things
my toes feel like roses
my fingers feel like buttercups
and you
everything i kneel before
are magic
does this feeling make us eternal?
in every reincarnation
i yearn the torment of finding us again
crave to unearth every page of your favorite fairytale
ache to tread into your dark mattered palace
to sleep surrounded by our glittered eternity
15.
I wish you had been better for me. I wish I had been better for you.
16.
articulating fish bones
with what it means to be light, the sun has been lazing,
scuffing the skin on its flickering
teeth exhausted, enchanted, enwreathed,
it slips a myth of grass into its gauzy skull, leaves
the types of fish in missouri -
circumstance, carp,
green mussels,
bass, nightmares
as common as the sloughing trembles
by the robins,
the sun just hits every second, frequent ghost by water,
by cloud,
if i told you this all had a taste, would you believe me?
a chamber of daffodils behaving like a single sheet of glass
delicate in notes, covered in acres, a kissing,
glacial flowering from across rooms touching
you, this is where i touch you, with the length of everything
the sun tries to touch the moon.
“if they carry you away, they got’ta carry me too.”
o.v. wright
17.
'Dreams of her'
She is sunshine on bare skin
She’s a glass of champagne;
Bubbly and bright. Intoxicating.
She is a dream within a dream, questioning your consciousness.
A warm spring morning.
With her is like drinking in espresso with lavender syrup and infusions of fresh cut grass and unadulterated innocence.
Rhythmic push and pull of breathing,
Like a moon drenched tide on rocky shores.
Her hair falling like evergreen branches, drenched in golden honey.
Body movements like the dances of 1000 blackbirds in the sky. Graceful and with confidence.
Messy in the way pancakes with extra syrup are.
As familiar as the map hanging on my wall, but with details to last a lifetime.
Our favorite joke; capitalism. Our hopes and dreams different and separate, but this life has carved out a truce to live in completion of us.
Whispers. Eyes locked.
Smirks. Teasing.
The color of emerald green, the smell of lavender purple.
A strand of lights in the garden, showing us where love grows.
Wild, free, and ours for the taking.
18.
when the flag is at half-mast i hope the president has died
when the flag is at half-mast i hope the president has died
& all the animals have escaped from the zoo
wall street is on fire
& congress too
a nation in mourning
from a debt collector flu
when the flag is at half-mast
i hope our love’s on the news
19.
̶S̶w̶i̶m̶ ̶M̶e̶e̶t̶
laid by your side
captain of the swim team
lap a f t e r lap
drenched in a gold
floral glow that
r a d i a t e s from your bedside
time grows softer for us
your eyes wash my s k i n
we will not wilt as we g r o w
upon a bed that t a s t e s
basement-sweet
I made the bed good
I made the bed good
I made the bed good
beat salt into our skin
tenderize the d e r m i s
what did it feel like
when you were made?
my body was t h r o w n
20.
I love our kitchen. I love our stove, even though the bottom left burner only works half the time and the food doesn’t cook evenly. The floor is so slanted our fridge door slams itself shut, and it’s so narrow in there we can only all fit in standing side by side. But our spice cabinet, it’s so damn cool. I love how deep the sink is, I love how we puzzle clean plates onto the dish rack. I love our bathroom. There’s technically no lock but the water pressure is so good for hot showers. I love our living room. It’s an oven in the summer and a freezer in the winter, but it lights up under the sun and that glow is unmatchable. I love our little reading nook next to all the basil and mint (i’m sorry for painting on top of the white carpet). I love our couch. I love our skylight, how the rain drums against it. I love that our rooms reflect each of us so potently. The two flights of stairs never get easier, but I love the name of our street and the number of our house.
21.
you shared a poem you heard on a youtube livestream with me because “[i] like poems right”
i memorized it, the last line ached. i’m glad you exist too
22.
Abiquiu
My alone is held here
In the red arms of your dirt
Layers of sediment and sage wrap me in a specific scent
I miss in the Midwest.
Everyone who knows you intimately
Knows your smell, beggaring description.
Returning to your wind on the road triggers tears of relief.
I roll down the window to let it run through me,
My fine hair a rusty nest,
Wet cheeks blown dry and quick in the desert.
The sun at your summits rings with hearty reminders–
Fossilized memories indelibly etched in me
Of freedom and versions of us.
A first kiss on the chalky Todilto Formation–
Sweat cooling, shoulders baking;
Mud fights in the arroyo
reeking of unrecognized sexual tension;
Spontaneous and sketchy tatts
Drawn in our skin at an Espanola strip mall;
Stolen beer and fire-roasted locusts;
A folk song’s call and response;
Broken bottles on a mesa I think I’m the first to climb;
Naked plunges in your reservoir, moonbathing;
Dawn meditation at your monastery.
The tears who accompany me
On the road back to humid flatlands
Take their damn time to evaporate.
But I have learned more of mesas and valleys
Since my first enchantment.
And part of loving is yearning.
23.
A Morning Hallelujah
And the trees
And the blossoms that bloomed last spring
And this fall with its crisp
autumnal awakening to within
And my heart
My heart who hears the Ghost twinkle
The spirited flesh acknowledgement
Of being beyond blood and bone
Of being within, and without
With my friends
And the trees
With their joyous quaking
The trees
A sprinkling reflection
Of Abundance imbued
And birthing creation
And the hallelujah of the morning
The hallelujah of getting to mourn
When it’s all falling
The hallelujah of the reprieve
And the grieve
And the reflect
And the anticipation
For whatever is next
Hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah
For all the love we have yet to confess.
24.
you spit twice inside the fish tank,
& whatever holds your spit in form,
it does,
& it bobs
& it curtsies
forward in space
over the acrylic crystals
holding the bottom of the tank
like two poached eggs
in a satin vat.
the catfish swims over to it.
i don’t want you to spit
just in my mouth.
i want you to spit
like it’s currency
& i want you
to like me
the way you like common florida trees
waterlogged, bald
cypress, mangrove,
pigeon
plum,
buttonwood,
mahogany, soapberry,
the kids
are in bed in a dream,
championing the blood
of romanticism peeling
it’s filigree between us,
cherished shimmer
of a cheaply made western
we saved just for this
viewing.
25.
Musings on Love & Perspective in 200 Words or Less:
When we think of love we frame it in our minds as a great pressence. It is as expansive as the sky & as deep as an ocean. Of these two comparisons, both represent seemingly never-ending vastness. One can see then, how love can also engulf its beholder. And that is the sublime nature of love, the cause for much hesitation. For if one is swallowed whole, what will become of them? If they cannot surrender, transform even, then they are left in an empty void, grasping.
If that is where one finds themselves, much dispair may unfold; questions around how they fell, & who tripped them. It may be hard to notice at first, but those who know how to look will start to see that they are indeed not in a void, but surrounded by stars & fish and everything they at first took for granted.
26.
My Familiar
Cat eyes gold as the sun that bakes her velvet black fur,
slowly open and close in response to mine.
As we lay in the grassy yard, I put my pink nose close to hers.
She licks it.
I hold up a leaf, for her to sniff.
She leans in.
I wonder what it tells her.
Each whiff a flare of nostrils, a story that only she could read.
Turning my cheek to the sun I lay still with her.
The sky stretched out above us as we stretch beneath it.
Content to let the bugs nip and flutter about, as the light changes to amber.
I marvel at the serenity of it all.
I turn to her and we observe each other a moment.
I blink my eyes slowly open and closed.
She returns the gesture.
In fading light we head home.
Warm fur and the small weight of her against my bare arms.
I kiss her head and tell her I love her.
27.
A love letter to movement
Deep peace, calm
Is all I want
With all these thoughts floating, constantly
Telling me what I am
What I’m not…
A love letter to breath
How it soothes.
The most crazed bouts of headiness
The tightest of tissue
Relaxes
A reminder of the simplicity of it all…
A Love letter to You
Your assurance
Your comfort
Your safety
Your kisses
Cause wanton anxieties
About the future of you and I
How nothing good lasts forever
But then I come back to movement, breath, myself…
To remind me of who I am
What life is about
Movement
Breath
Love
You once told me you love the way I breathe
It meant a lot.
28.
Impulses
Quick flicks of rapid muscle motion,
Images flash
My friend is getting married and
I love that
A house I’ve been dreaming of, decorated just so
I love that
The artists creating so quickly when the product is revealed
I love that
The cat video that makes me smile
I love that
My hand cramps,
Phone screen locks,
In the sudden dark room I wonder,
what I had been looking for
29.
::Rosy::
New Love Feels Pink
Greeting the Day with Blushing Light
A Grapefruit Fresh-Squeezed
Rose Quartz Peonies, Crystal Glasses Clink
Rosé Lips, Salmon Lox
Coral Shells Collected, with Flushing Cheeks
Salt Lamp Glow, Petals Float
The Belt of Venus over Lotus and Phlox
Full Pink Moon In Taurus
Healing Scars Kissed with Tender Love
Scented Sheets, Skin Warmed
Laying there Curled with Caring Lust
30.
Remember that I Love You
still
in the the middle of the night
as I awaken shaken and suddenly met with a child between her door frame and mine
remember that I love you
when I take her back to bed and bend over her sleep steeped body,
my thighs tingling in instinct and adrenaline and ‘are you sure you’re alright?’s
her pure and pre-pubescent limbs wrapped in the blanket my mother made for me
what did her mother make
for her
besides her
remember that I love you
even as I walk away
even when my back is turned
even as I leave the room
even when the door shuts behind me
remember that I love you
still as the computer flashes on the wall
in the stenciling light,
in the patterns in the hallway
in my bangs split out of slumber, which you have seen
and seen
and seen
and will see
you, always.
31.
About love or hate, about what hurts or hurts once ... Maybe it will stop hurting ... It's like the story of two past hearts and one thread ... When my lips whisper darkness inside, I want a curled snail, I want to touch the curtains and say the words, but what not I know ... it's like a small ball on a bright day where it will burn from the fire of the warmth of feelings ...
32.
I’m never alone with you.
I’m never without a hand to hold or a mouth
to press against my own.
I think that we’re made from the same
stardust, the way that we fit perfectly together,
the way I know our souls are in mirror image
of each other’s
But at the barest level. We are two bodies
that will never get close enough. Two souls
isolated simply by the smallest molecules
Between our flush skin.
I yearn to sink my soul into yours, to let them
Tangle and intertwine, so I push my fingertips
against your skin and will the floodgates of your
soul to open.
If we all die alone, all die hidden inside our
minds where the world can’t reach us, then I
am glad that my soul, either by design or by habit, has
molded to yours,
I am glad that if my soul is alone, it will always be alone with yours.
33.
Dear
lunging forward
in darkness, envisage
the grandeur of the grasses
the fawn in the field
and it all reminds me
my love
how far-reaching it feels
how trying it is
to crawl across this rugged and vast landscape
searching through blurred brush for
the traces of your body
like the hope of a light far into the distance
like almond eyes lunging forward
like veering to the shoulder
like feeling
the jolt of your body
hitting me again
crooked nose & broken back
I know you
when you hit me
they say it’s safer to hit a deer head on
than to swerve,
to miss
34.
there are so many things in this life that make me feel inconsequential so small yet of all these things my mother isn’t one of them there are moments when i am depleted wearing so thin i could shatter with the slightest touch when i am a crevice of aberrations discarded into oblivion and even in this withered state she is by my side holding my hand
she reminds me this was never supposed to be easy and sadness is a flame that will always flicker but i don’t have to be enough for the world i only have to be enough for myself she reminds me i am immaculate full of power and worthy of love she sees through the veil of self doubt i’ve cloaked myself in for who i am the strong woman she’s made me and she sees my very existence as an inextinguishable light upon the cosmos as if to say the world cannot go on without me
she has always seen me this way as a priceless masterpiece in the museum full of art and who am i to doubt my mother who embodies the constellations continuously shining bright and always guiding the way
35.
like cats’ toes
like road trips
like laying under trees
or acorns and their tops
like rain covered windshields
or orange moons
like accidentally bumping knees
or sitting on your kitchen floor
like when you read to me
lifting your hand from my hair to turn the page
36.
flowers as a goodbye present
knowing they’ll bloom after i leave