not back, let’s not come back, let’s go by the speed of 
queer zest & stay up 
there & get ourselves a little 
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden 

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean 
i was already moonlighting 
as an online moonologist 
most weekends, so this is the immensely 

logical next step, are you 
packing your bags yet, don’t forget your 
sailor moon jean jacket, let’s wear 
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter, 

queerer moon gravity, let’s love each other 
(so good) on the moon, let’s love 
the moon        
on the moon

Copyright © 2021 by Chen Chen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 31, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

My whole life I have obeyed it—

            its every hunting. I move beneath it
            as a jaguar moves, in the dark-
                          liquid blading of shoulder.

The opened-gold field and glide of the hand,

            light-fruited, and scythe-lit.

I have come to this god-made place—

           Teotlachco, the ball court—
           because the light called: lightwards!
                        and dwells here, Lamp-land.    
          
           We touch the ball of light
           to one another—split bodies stroked bright—
                        desire-knocked.
                                    Light reshapes my lover’s elbow, 
  
           a brass whistle.

I put my mouth there—mercy-luxed, and come, we both,

           to light. It streams me.
           A rush of scorpions—
                        fast-light. A lash of breath—
                                    god-maker.
      
           Light horizons her hip—springs an ocelot
           cut of chalcedony and magnetite.
                       Hip, limestone and cliffed,

slopes like light into her thigh—light-box, skin-bound.

           Wind shakes the calabash,
           disrupts the light to ripple—light-struck,
                       then scatter.
 
This is the war I was born toward, her skin,

           its lake-glint. I desire—I thirst—
           to be filled—light-well.
 
The light throbs everything, and songs

           against her body, girdling the knee bone.
           Our bodies—light-harnessed, light-thrashed.
                       The bruising: bilirubin bloom,
                                    violet.

A work of all good yokes—blood-light—

           to make us think the pain is ours
           to keep, light-trapped, lanterned.
                       I asked for it. I own it—
                                    lightmonger.

I am light now, or on the side of light—

           light-head, light-trophied.
           Light-wracked and light-gone.

           Still, the sweet maize—an eruption
           of light, or its feast,
                       from the stalk
                                    of my lover’s throat.

And I, light-eater, light-loving.

Copyright © 2018 by Natalie Diaz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 4, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

We move within the snow-chromed world: Like-animal. Like-deer. An alphabet. Along a street white as lamplight into the winter, walking—: like language, a new text. I touch her with the eyes of my skin.

The way I read any beloved—: from the ramus of the left jaw down to the cuneiform of the right foot. She isn’t so much what she is—: and becomes herself only when added to the space where she isn’t. What is touch—: not the touch not the hand but the white heat it floats through.

I count her my desires, mark her—: hoofprints across the frozen page. Four strokes of dusk. Carbon black, Lamp black, Bone black, Hide glue—: I am the alchemist of ink. She answers me, Quicksilver,

and the noise of her boots upon the snow is the weight of a night bird bending the meteor-blue branch fruiting white flames of cotton. Each of her steps, an allograph—: bird, flexed limb, perfect line of vertebrae, the glyph of my pelvis.

When I put my teeth to her wrist, the world goes everywhere white. Not sound but the dizzying nautilus of what is both the palm and the ear. I invented her hand in this texture—: a grapheme.

In me, a feeling—: white blossom with a red-sided icosahedron inside the velveteen car of a gold train vibrating the violet tunnel of my throat on its way to a dimmed station in my chest—: twenty seats of desire, and I am sitting in each one.

I burn on the silver sparks of her breath moving out of her body. The miracle. No. The power and the glory glory glory of her—: she breathes. Out—: Out—: twenty red seats of desire, I break every one. A series of waves against hammer anvil stirrup—: a vibration of light I can hold with my mouth.

From Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020) by Natalie Diaz. Copyright © 2020 by Natalie Diaz. Used with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb    disgraced    goes on doing

now diagram the sentence


2007

From Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, published by W.W. Norton. Copyright © 2011 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.