Because the bee
In my bonnet
Is the B in my bed,
Who I can’t and I
Won’t stop bumping;
We do the humpty
Hump. My big nose
Nestled in her sassafras.
At attention, we round
Each other out. At ease,
Her peach is a galaxy.
Now and later is a square
I quietly hold on my tongue,
My mouth an empty gesture.
Spaced out between her legs,
I am an astronaut.
The gravity of my offense
Adds up to a rational number.
When the heavens are free
From light, I sit desire on my lap.
She is stardust; And I,
As it were, am impossible.
When she asks for space
She is the future. When she
Asks for a room, it is the end.
I place before her chutes,
Ladders, and whatever else
Might fall from the sky.
Copyright © 2021 by Alison C. Rollins. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 18, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
But where do the breasts go first is my question.
I understand their fantasies of fleeing south.
The winters are loud and long and white
and by March, well. I wonder why I’m still
in it too. Now the round pits thumb up
beneath the skin, tender and hot to the touch,
crushed by my new weight. This island I’ve
had to make of myself brought a bevy,
angered by easy pleasures: sugar, soy sauce,
potatoes, ice cream. My love’s language
is to make a meal, ask what I can take in,
ask what maladies to avoid. As for my house:
touch is far and few between. Desire wanes
between compresses of cloves cinnamon turmeric
and honey. But in the mornings, a gulf between us,
my hands are kissed. The blinds drawn to keep
the sun from disturbing my sleep while we wait
patiently for my body’s quiet prayer of thanks.
Copyright © 2020 by Aricka Foreman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 20, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
//
When my partner asks me for a self-
portrait, I tell them:
Just out of high school
I worked as a statue
of liberty. I wore blue velvet
and danced along an off-
shoot of route 6. Mascot
for freedom—I advertised
a tax agency. I had come
out that year.
Passersby rolled
down their windows,
threw lit cigarettes, trash, pennies.
I have always been one for retaliation.
So I threw the torch.
\\
//
My partner and I research the back-
yard tree with purple droppings
until we discover
she’s a true princess.
Royal green blood with roots
the size of bodies.
This princess is invasive.
She garden-snakes under
our home and upheaves
what we thought we knew
of ourselves. And god,
isn’t it terrible to gender
even a tree. Isn’t it terrible
that she reminds us of what
we’ve named our bodies’
shortcomings. A flower
concaved as cunt
seems, right now, like a betrayal
we will never forgive.
But soon
\\
//
I dream that my partner leaves me
for eight years in the Coast Guard,
a kraken stings the surface
of this dark blue nightmare.
Split this dream in half and it becomes
four years and I still don’t know
how to swim. None of this is real.
But god, my partner loves the water,
enough even, for me to get in.
\\
//
When my partner turns their hands
into window blinds, they smooth
my aging forehead with this new
type of shade, they call my skin
into perfect order with their skin.
I tell my partner I will be polite
to windows
only when I like what I see
through them. They understand
that this world is hell
bent beyond repair.
But inside
one another
there is a peace.
Inside one another
neither of us remembers gender—the meaning
of her or hers. She is lost
to space. He was never
that great to begin with.
We even misplaced the meaning of girl.
If we knew where it had been left,
we still wouldn’t go get it.
\\
//
Today I am the age
of an arsenal
of letters.
Between my partner’s legs
I speak the whole
alphabet. They stop me
when I’m close
to what feels right.
At the end of the day
all we have is this ritual
of love, and that, I think,
will be enough
to live forever.
\\
Copyright © 2018 Kayleb Rae Candrilli. This poem originally appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review. Used with permission of the author.
after Obergefell v. Hodges, summer 2015
I still have a question to ask—
what I don’t know is which words might compose it.
I know it lives, but where it might begin—
I have to squint like I do as it downpours
in the mountains; I cannot read the road.
Driving after dark, we feel the way, the last two
who don’t roam where others seem to—
I have told at least that many I would marry you
but neither sees our names before the code.
We seek no coverage, lower tax,
don’t imagine asking those we love
to stand for something we’d keep privately. I already
swear a dress each day we wake together,
use present tense verbs as often as
they tell the present truth. What I want to ask
is daily. I want to ask it in our houses, in our tent.
I want to find our roads however long they are
as we go, for you to realize my stories
and the details of their slower telling.
Would I say what I say in front of others,
yes. I want to say it all the time
in moments equal to one another, and for time
to unfold continuously, arrive continuously
from each measure as it’s made.
We’ll find a motel tonight if we have to, or sleep
in the car that smells of our bodies unshowered,
fueled by coffee and cheese eaten off the atlas,
nuts shaken in cinnamon—what matters most
is that I might still kill your sense of what is
every time I move into your body
the force it makes me. I want the question
live as it sounds: do you yet want
beyond a promise of anything.
I do not wish to turn from hunger. I could not
marry you absent the jagged world
that multiplies, complicates—may we marry
all grief, all longing, all shapeless dissatisfaction,
all long walks distance from our origins.
Do not leave. Walk as long as you can alone,
push back hard when you object to my position.
Divorce me every moment you decide
who you are and where you should
next be. Make your way. Make it
through me, some days, pushing through my body,
through our ties. Come through yourself
as though you have all the time in the world
even as it’s always subtracting
something from itself. For music, let’s sing
absently—I don’t want to translate even once
what we mean when we stand across
from one another speaking. No symbol
assigning something else. I feel
the dress—I feel its excellence
gelling, multiplying, becoming voluminous
for me and us; I feel it peeling back
transparence as it releases.
Appear, my love, so I can step out of myself.
Make me undressable, make it impossible
for me to clothe myself, make the garments
the lies they are—attend this living
as blatantly as anyone living must, awake
to meanings carried from meaningless things.
That is all I ask. There is no moment
we could exchange our words. We will
repeat nothing, just pray we provoke
each dark as we go, go with all that begs
to marry itself to some ever-casting horizon,
to marry itself to the furthest away thing.
Horizons always move, make an argument
about time, pray something.
Would I too? Is that how I find myself?
Would I bend to recognize
the curve I make around my center, keep
a center, bend toward it equally at every point?
Bend, love, I imagine myself saying,
to where you find me, wherever I may be,
wherever you find that bending becoming
your will and your innate way. I bend and pray
you’ll marry my unfixing, as I will always be,
or draw back from what you believe of me—
that you might bend harder than law allows,
that we might never marry civilly.
Copyright © 2017 by Rae Gouirand. “Not Marrying” originally appeared in the winter/spring 2017 issue of diode poetry journal. Used with permission of the author.