You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I've ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone, swaddled in strange air I was that alone again, inventing life left after you. I don't want to remember you as that four o'clock in the morning eight months long after you happened to me like a wrong number at midnight that blew up the phone bill to an astronomical unknown quantity in a foreign currency. The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me. You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown into the space you measure with someone you can love back without a caveat. While I love somebody I learn to live with through the downpulled winter days' routine wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine- assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust- balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust that what comes next comes after what came first. She'll never be a story I make up. You were the one I didn't know where to stop. If I had blamed you, now I could forgive you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox- imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind, want where it no way ought to be, defined by where it was, and was and was until the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled through one cheek's nap, a syllable, a tear, was never blame, whatever I wished it were. You were the weather in my neighborhood. You were the epic in the episode. You were the year poised on the equinox.
"Against Elegies," from Winter Numbers by Marilyn Hacker. Copyright © 1994 by Marilyn Hacker. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
For weeks, I breathe his body in the sheet and pillow. I lift a blanket to my face. There’s bitter incense paired with something sweet, like sandalwood left sitting in the heat or cardamom rubbed on a piece of lace. For weeks, I breathe his body. In the sheet I smell anise, the musk that we secrete with longing, leather and moss. I find a trace of bitter incense paired with something sweet. Am I imagining the wet scent of peat and cedar, oud, impossible to erase? For weeks, I breathe his body in the sheet— crushed pepper—although perhaps discreet, difficult for someone else to place. There’s bitter incense paired with something sweet. With each deployment I become an aesthete of smoke and oak. Patchouli fills the space for weeks. I breathe his body in the sheet until he starts to fade, made incomplete, a bottle almost empty in its case. There’s bitter incense paired with something sweet. And then he’s gone. Not even the conceit of him remains, not the resinous base. For weeks, I breathed his body in the sheet. He was bitter incense paired with something sweet.
Copyright © 2013 by Jehanne Dubrow. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on December 20, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
There is no known root for how the word cum
came to mean what it does. But imagine
if you could stitch a lineage back to the Latin
cum meaning to step. Hence: movement.
Hence: a destination. The body moving,
perhaps dancing, toward a kind of end.
Vanishing point of flesh—trembling tongue
-fucked apocalyptic. Apocalypsis. A veil
shifted & what awaits beneath. A rose
by any other given name could still
draw blood if it wanted. But shit, turns out
there’s no emoji for a rubber dick
sat heavy on the tongue. Go figure. I can
still feel it twitch. Hold you in my mouth
spit slick apocrypha. Sweet faggot magic
the way we speak organs out of their
Christian names—lick cock to clit, bruise
breast to flattened chest, bury knuckles inside
a redrafted anatomy. Sucked finger shudder. Lust
-hot alchemy. Holy, how even the air becomes
wind when moving. Holy, how you fuck me
by my one unburied name. & when I tell you
how beautiful you are, you riot-laughter,
kiss me & call me a dyke. Your smile arrives,
day-bright, unburdens the slur of all its blood.
Originally published in Ninth Letter. Copyright © 2021 by torrin a. greathouse. Used with the permission of the author
In some other life, I can hear you
breathing: a pale sound like running
fingers through tangled hair. I dreamt
again of swimming in the quarry
& surfaced here when you called for me
in a voice only my sleeping self could
know. Now the dapple of the aspen
respires on the wall & the shades cut
its song a staff of light. Leave me—
that me—in bed with the woman
who said all the sounds for pleasure
were made with vowels I couldn’t
hear. Keep me instead with this small sun
that sips at the sky blue hem of our sheets
then dips & reappears: a drowsy penny
in the belt of Venus, your aureole nodding
slow & copper as it bobs against cotton
in cornflower or clay. What a waste
the groan of the mattress must be
when you backstroke into me & pull
the night up over our heads. Your eyes
are two moons I float beneath & my lungs
fill with a wet hum your hips return.
It’s Sunday—or so you say with both hands
on my chest—& hot breath is the only hymn
whose refrain we can recall. And then you
reach for me like I could’ve been another
man. You make me sing without a sound.
Copyright © 2019 by Meg Day. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 1, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.