When the grapevine had thinned
but not broken & the worst was yet to come
of winter snow, I tracked my treed heart
to the high boughs of a quaking
aspen & shot it down.
                                           If love comes fast,
let her be a bullet & not a barking dog;
let my heart say, as that trigger’s pulled,
Are all wonders small? Otherwise, let love
be a woman of gunpowder
                                                   & lead; let her
arrive a brass angel, a dark powdered comet
whose mercy is dense as the fishing sinker
that pulleys the moon, even when it is heavy
with milk. I shot my heart
                                                 & turned myself in
to wild kindness, left the road to my coffin
that seemed also to include my carrying it & walked
back along the trampled brush I remembered
only as a blur of hot breath & a howling in my chest.

^{translated from the ancient Greek by Bliss Carman}

It was summer when I found you 
In the meadow long ago, 
And the golden vetch was growing
By the shore.

Did we falter when love took us 
With a gust of great desire? 
Does the barley bid the wind wait
In his course?

I shall never have any fear of love, 
Not of its depth nor its uttermost height,
Its exquisite pain and its terrible delight.
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never hesitate to go down
Into the fastness of its abyss
Nor shrink from the cruelty of its awful kiss.
I shall never have any fear of love.

Never shall I dread love’s strength
Nor any pain it might give.
Through all the years I may live
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never draw back from love
Through fear of its vast pain
But build joy of it and count it again.
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never tremble nor flinch
From love’s moulding touch:
I have loved too terribly and too much
Ever to have any fear of love.

^{It had been a long time since I’d gone any place I’d wanted to be.
—Ottessa Moshfegh}

^{I eat the dark.
—Susan Rowland}

In a candlelit room up north,
I undress before the mirror, beckon
my reflection to bear witness,
petition the vanishing gaze of wax & wick
to salvage an unsalvageable man.

//

I flesh through each melancholy hour,
sceptre the moon into place.
Clouds cape the night in slaughtered wool.
What good is a witch who cannot sever
what was never meant or, better,
summon the dead’s most lonesome ovation?

//

On our first date, we speak of
cemeteries. I am mourning.
Poisoned sentimental. I tell her
of a photograph from the 1800s,
lovers earthed in a two-person coffin.
I am romanced by this shared vessel,
dark mudhive where love rots eternal.
She remains unmoved. Balks
at such commitment, the excess
of endlessness.

//

Oh look, I’m scrolling through a dead man’s phone again.
Last winter, I learned every other word for hunger.
So what do you imagine I can bring to your bed?

//

Tragic little masochist, I wife the shadow
of a coin-operated horse. We lower ourselves
into the underworld, nightgown clinging
like a phantom’s bedsheet.
Bridled/bridal, I feed myself
to the famished dark.
Something empty enters the room,
steeples through my wet aperture.

//

I awaken, pinned to the stranger’s headboard.
Light fangs from the mouth of my own becoming.
I pull her into me. Joybent, our dizzy
hammers hammer the gash. O god, when we climb
inside each other, vowels slashing the air,
I become more woman than sacrifice.
A lovesick witch hurled, moonward.

To my daughters I need to say:

Go with the one who loves you biblically.
The one whose love lifts its head to you
despite its broken neck. Whose body bursts
sixteen arms electric to carry you, gentle
the way old grief is gentle.

Love the love that is messy in all its too much,
The body that rides best your body, whose mouth
saddles the naked salt of your far gone hips,
whose tongue translates the rock language of
all your elegant scars.

Go with the one who cries out for her tragic sisters
as she chops the winter’s wood, the one whose skin
triggers your heart into a heaven of blood waltzes.

Go with the one who resembles most your father.
Not the father you can point out on a map,
but the father who is here, is your home,
is the key to your front door.

Know that your first love will only be the first.
And the second and third and even fourth
will unprepare you for the most important:

The Blessed. The Beast. The Last Love,

which is, of course, the most terrifying kind.
Because which of us wants to go with what can murder us?
Can reveal to us our true heart’s end and its thirty years
spent in poverty? Can mimic the sound of our bird-throated mothers,
replicate the warmth of our brothers’ tempers?
Can pull us out of ourselves until we are no longer sisters
or daughters or sword swallowers but, instead,
women who give and lead and take and want
and want and want and want,
because there is no shame in wanting.

And you will hear yourself say:

Last Love, I wish to die so I may come back to you
new and never tasted by any other mouth but yours.
And I want to be the hands that pull your children
out of you and tuck them deep inside myself until they are
ready to be the children of such a royal and staggering love.
Or you will say:

Last Love, I am old, and have spent myself on the courageless,
have wasted too many clocks on less-deserving men,
so I hurl myself at the throne of you and lie humbly at your feet.

Last Love, let me never roll out of this heavy dream of you,
let the day I was born mean my life will end
where you end. Let the man behind the church
do what he did if it brings me to you. Let the girls
in the locker room corner me again if it brings me to you.
Let this wild depression throw me beneath its hooves
if it brings me to you. Let me pronounce my hoarded joy
if it brings me to you. Let my father break me again
and again if it brings me to you.

Last love, I have let other men borrow your children. Forgive me.
Last love, I once vowed my heart to another. Forgive me.
Last Love, I have let my blind and anxious hands wander into a room
and come out empty. Forgive me.

Last Love, I have cursed the women you loved before me. Forgive me.
Last Love, I envy your mother’s body where you resided first. Forgive me.
Last Love, I am all that is left. Forgive me.
Last Love, I did not see you coming. Forgive me.

Last Love, every day without you was a life I crawled out of. Amen.
Last Love, you are my Last Love. Amen.
Last Love, I am all that is left. Amen.

I am all that is left.
Amen.

Night was done. We rose and after 
Washing, dressing,—kissed with laughter,—
After all, the sweet night knows. 
Lilac breakfast cups were clinking 
While we sat like brothers drinking 
Tea,—and kept our dominoes.

And our dominoes smiled greeting, 
And our eyes avoided meeting 
With our dumb lips’ secrecy.
“Faust” we sang, we played, denying
Night’s strange memories, strangely dying,
As though night’s twain were not we.

what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses

the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west

boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love 

how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how 

it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was, 

at the time, unlivable. my sweetheart. my excised sheep’s-heart. 

my fled garden. my metal garter. after yet another man calls his wife 

his partner at the dog park it’s clearly time to find another name for you—

he says it’s my partner’s birthday we’re going to buca di beppo then key largo—

and wild how quick a name becomes yet another vehicle 

through which to reproduce violence. partner fit like a skin and then 

that skin tightened and tore off—you who are neither my chain 

italian restaurant nor my all-inclusive vacation spot. not my owner

or my only or my own. not my down payment or my dowery

of sheep and crop. not lost. not loss. apophasis is a way of naming 

what is by what is not—but what is? my boutonniere. my goofy queer. 

my salt. my silk. my silt. my slit. my top and my basement. my vanquished 

prostate. my battered apostate. my memory. my memory. my meteor. 

all these names for what exactly? to introduce what is to those 

who don’t know. this is my whole. this is my hole. take part of me. 

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
    Half of the night with our old friend
        Who'd showed us in the end
    To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
        Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug, 
        Suddenly, from behind, 
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
        Your instep to my heel,
    My shoulder-blades against your chest.
    It was not sex, but I could feel
    The whole strength of your body set,
           Or braced, to mine,
        And locking me to you
    As if we were still twenty-two
    When our grand passion had not yet
        Become familial.
    My quick sleep had deleted all 
    Of intervening time and place.
        I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?

  He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.

I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,

  And went with half my life about my ways.

And when we are finished, I ask
            if she thinks us grotesque,
two plain monsters basking
            in our blood—our liquid plaque.

We celebrate the art of
            our unmaking. She spirals my body
into a single drop, ambrosia
            spoiled by the Gods. I copy

the signature of her sin-
            ged moan, grind it down
until it becomes my own dim
            map. Even the Gods fuck. Crown

themselves in gardens pastored
            by snakes. I am crying. Not out of shame
but out of tradition. To have mastered
            this want, only to carve for it a lock, a name

as queer as unholy. How queer it fits
            inside the mouth, how queer is my woman
and the sweat she makes of me, a sweet trick
            of her tongue. Don’t we deserve a hand-

made altar. Don’t we deserve a crowd
            of worshipers to carry our bed. And yes
please to the beads, the sacred
            wars, the body ornaments, the vain-eyed

statues pulsing deep with our flood.
            Yes to the orchestrated violence, a quiver
licked down my spine. May our love blood
            the skies like a storm of Gods high off terror.

O Zeus. O Oshun. O Ra. O Kali. O Me. O Her. O Gods—God? 
            Yes. Gods. Don’t act like you don’t know our names’ roar.
Whispered. Sweet and savage inside your temples.
            Preserved behind velvet doors.

I’ve never made love to a man.
I’ve never made love to a man but I imagine.

                         I imagine pulling the moon.
                         I imagine pulling the moon out of his brow.

Pulling the moon out of his brow and eating it again.

                         Eating and pulling his hair in silence.
A kind of silence when the moon goes out.

When the moon goes back and forth between us.

A kind of silence lit for only a moment.
Seeing for a moment through the eyes of the horse.

                         Through the eyes of the dead horse
                         that burns slower than my hair.

My hair that burns the moon off.
My hair with a hand inside it.

                        has twenty-five floors. Its letters hum  
                       to pedestrians in large metal serif.  
                      From Floor 19, you can see offices across  
                     the street, suits dimming their desk lamps.  
                    Like all hotel rooms, this one’s asking you 
                   to cry. You wait until you’ve left the large bed,  
                  the elevator dings open and you’re on West 46th 
                 passing long October coats. Only there, away  
                from the cornerless dark where your lover sleeps,  
               away from the room’s disarming neutrality,  
              can you soften into what’s next. The relief  
             of dropping sad water on pavement used  
            to catching it. How steady the scaffolding.  
           How predictable its right angles. Under them,  
          the curve of your head gains balance.  
         Feathers continue their low pivoting  
        in sudden storm. On Floor 19, your lover’s eyelids  
       and shoulders open, the glass wall bends 
      to his length. Last night, while under it,  
     you could taste plaster, steel, ascension of thighs,  
    their blueprint drawn for reascending. Under him,  
   you understood there’s no safe engineering  
  for this much want. What will you lose, pivoting  
on 10th Ave? If you could tell him no, you wouldn’t.