To Let this Woman Love Me
I must let go of the story—
the low call of home,
my father begging my mother
not to terminate the pregnancy,
the image of the ocher Sierra
Nevada scraping the underbelly
of a cerulean sky. I want to let
my lover touch me there
in the shambles of language
and loss. She kisses
my stomach as if there were no
cartography of damage,
not the skin raised and darkened
by injury. When I yelp in pain,
my lover says I’m sorry—although
I am the one failing to hold
the position, my legs open wide
enough to receive the fullness
of her, but my hips demand release.
She holds me without
admitting what she senses I cannot
speak: this caesura of wound,
this repetition of all my losing,
the silence and failure
of loving with a ruined heart.
She enters me with tenderness
and holds me at the black edge
of fear until I give in.
Copyright © 2026 by E. Hughes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 14, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘To Let this Woman Love Me’ is an attempt to observe the firsthand pain of love and intimacy, which demands one’s transformation, a kind of dying. This poem responds to Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Both Sides Now,’ in which she sings ‘I really don’t know love at all’ and to Robert Hayden’s question in the poem ‘Those Winter Sundays’: ‘What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?’ Similarly, this poem asks: How will I overcome my own history, my own ruin? How will I allow another person to enter that sacred, secret space of devastation?”
—E. Hughes
E. Hughes
