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.