Poems for Valentine's Day (Even If You're Not Quite in Love)
With Valentine’s Day looming vaguely over your right shoulder, we dipped into our archives for some love and some not-so-love poems. Whether you’re feeling undying love or a confusing stage of not-dating, poems often have just the right words to reach inside and hold your heart steady. There’s a reason Sex & the City’s Big sent Carrie love poems from the greatest poets of all time. You don’t need him though. You can read these poems on your phone and cry on the subway all by yourself.
In the Chapel of St. Mary's by Donika Kelly
(Issue 39, Spring 2017)
I can't tell you what happened
there, why I entered the sanctuary,
a non-believer. Only that I
have been thinking about worship,
the altar of the body and supplication,
for some time. My thoughts turn,
as they often do in this season of absence,
to my wife, and how tired a god can get
when called, and too often, for little reason
but loneliness. Of course I don’t mean god here,
but rather the woman I love, who alters
the orbit of my life, pulls me with the density
of light toward her, the draw thinner
when she is farther away, as she is now.
I try to find comfort in the inevitability
of science, when what I lack is faith.
The sanctuary—the stained glass,
four girls saturating it with soft chatter,
small pots of stargazer lilies, a lace ribbon
for each pew—this place is full of faith
in the unknown, and I don’t know
how to believe in what I cannot see.
Tonight, I will drive through the foothills
and into the valley. I will try to make
a little practice, to trust you are with me,
even though you are somewhere else.
oakland, 2010 by Mariama Lockington
(Issue 36, Fall 2015)
all you said was good morning, beautiful all you did
was cook me beans and rice, make love to me again
in the egg yolk light, all you wanted was
to take my hand, joy-stumble into the gasping air
walk the lake while it yawned its silver
long as the eye could see
i can’t tell you how far away i was that year
how safe it felt to prowl around
the dark town, drinking up everything
how good it felt to ram my body into the middle
of a crowded dance floor, only to come out
the other side with someone else to spin myself into
some new flesh to wrap around my bones and organs
my tricky little heart, pumping to a stranger’s rhythm
all you wanted was to keep me, but i was practicing
how not to be still, how to be furious wind
gathering speed and kelp and headlines
all you did was call me beautiful and i
could not breathe, i could not move
i could not howl and thrash the way i needed to
courses by Mariama Lockington
(Issue 36, Fall 2015)
what table set of your bone
what silver what flesh
dream of your throat
what melting what flavor
cumin currant coconut
your clavicle mantle for my mandible
what wishbone split cracked and tasted
rooms and rooms of your marrow
what fullness what hands
what shoulder hip
touch this ending
never before so hungry
never before this taste
savor this mouth
opening and closing
what city lost what walls
what sky all fragments
all polished all candlelit reflection
all slow sipping and chewing
and licking of ones fingers
all drinking and swallowing
and spitting out of ones skin
a single hair caught between teeth
what feasting
each time appearing
before one another
still wanting
what delight
little girls turned plentiful
turned women
plated the two of us
picked to the bone
the very last succulence
what dance what etiquette
what world of carcassash
you and i rising
again and again to feed
love poem by Morgan Parker
(Issue 36, Fall 2015)
As my final feminist act
I want to make you my husband.
I want to get rich
and be a kind of Oprah.
You know how white people
are so leisurely: that
will be us. Our days in
a king-sized bed with all
our friends, strong cider,
strong pot, fireworks, fireworks.
I want to know you know
I’m in charge.
I want to build a reef for us
and fill it with arrows.
My nerves will break in half.
I’ll be the kind of whole
girl who drags her hooves on soft
grass, breathes when she’s full.
triptych by Safia Elhillo
(Issue 38, Fall 2016)
if you see him tell him i have
opened all the windows a storm collects outside
& i have only ever loved men marked to die reassure me
i watch the wind tangle up the curtains in a way that is not
cruel tell him to push me up against the cinnamon tree
to be kissed watch me disappear into its bark
wait never leave me & not to be afraid
to turn me return me pull my leaves off by fistful
& listen for my particular autumn dismantle me for firewood
& with what is left a house
*
because the night air coats
my sweat-bright neck
with its tongue because
my hair writes a slick cursive
across my brow & nape
because all day the sun
rode my particular brown
& made it sing i let
his mouth open & add
to the dark in the room
with my name
*
i know a boy who tells a story
about bleeding into the red sea
i see the colors when i have bad dreams
a boy who made me a wound a door
to open and close he fills my eyes & fills
my eyes like a tear or like the hot white sun
who broke the beads i wear around my waist
material objects my mother says absorb the harm
meant for my body
from cento for the night i said, "i love you" by Nicole Sealey
(Issue 40, Fall 2017)
Men are so clueless sometimes,
like startled fish
living just to live.
We are dying quickly
but behave as good guests should:
patiently allowing the night
to have the last word.
And I just don't know,
you know? I never had a whole lot to say
while talking to strange men.
*
What allows some strangers to go past strangeness? Exchanging
yearning for permanence. And who wouldn't
come back to bed? Love—
How free are; how bound. Put here in love's name:
called John. A name so common as
a name sung quietly from somewhere.
Like a cry abandoned someplace
in a city about which I know.
*
I love you, I say, desperate
to admit that
the flesh extends its vanity
to an unknown land
where all the wild swarm.
This is not death. It is something safer,
almost made of air—
I think they call it god.
*