love poems

November 6, 2014

“Burka” by Charles Harper WebbPosted by

Charles Harper Webb

BURKA

The day after a door crushes his thumb,
the stain that flutters out of his cuticle
looks, at first, like a black squid
floating up through a pink sea. Then,
poised above the nail’s half-moon,
it seems a black burka with a white
slot through which dark pupils stare.

“Her face is scarred,” he thinks.
“She wears the burka to spare me.”
Then he thinks the eyes are Mom’s—
not crazed, as in the nursing home.
Forgiving. Warm. Or they belong
to some woman he misunderstood,
rejected, deceived, who loves him

still. Each day, the fluttering mark
climbs higher on his nail’s flesh-
colored wall. Bit by bit, it tops
his fingertip, is clipped, and falls,
re-joining—like everything he loved
has done or soon will do—
the dark.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
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Charles Harper Webb: “When I was sixteen, playing in rock bands and preparing to become a physicist, if someone had said, ‘You’ll end up a poet,’ I’d have assumed they’d end up swinging a rubber hoe on the funny farm. Now I find I’ve written poems for more than half of my life. So why (besides the groupies and big bucks) do I persist? For one thing, I hope to give to others some of the pleasure that good poems have given me. But I also want to wring more out of the time that I have left—to live, whenever I can, with my awareness, intelligence, and imagination fully engaged. Poetry does that for me.” (web)

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November 5, 2014

“Triolet for Carol” by John L. StanizziPosted by

John L. Stanizzi

TRIOLET FOR CAROL

So many things that still feel new
are old, and that’s the way it goes.
This is what always happens to
so many things that still feel new.

I think of how I have loved you
all these years, and that just shows
so many things that still feel new
feel new because of the life we chose.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
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John L. Stanizzi: “The poem is from a manuscript in progress called Hallelujah Time! based on the albums of Bob Marley—specifically Burnin’, Exodus, Confrontation, and Survival. The poems are loosely inspired by Bob’s songs, and when it’s appropriate the biblical inspiration Bob used to get to the writing of the song. The poems in the book appear in the same order as the songs on the albums. Completion of Hallelujah Time! is about two years ago. Jah Bless!”

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November 4, 2014

“Instead of a Victorian Novel I Write a Victorian Poem” by Joanna SolfrianPosted by

Joanna Solfrian

INSTEAD OF A VICTORIAN NOVEL I WRITE A VICTORIAN POEM

There is always a man,
slight and dark-socketed, standing by a window,
gazing at the mute and luminous moon.

Always the room is chandeliered,
warm at the center, and the conversation falls
in glitters like snowflakes and their infinitesimal knives.

The man wishes to speak to someone.

Always in the room there is a woman
radiating from her bones
who wants nothing but the man’s loneliness
projected onto her palms.

Most often, neither speaks.

The woman remains on her spot of circumference,
her constructed worlds trembling in her breast,

and the man remains at the window,
slinging his losses at the moon.

Who can advise these two?

The moon, from her judicial height,
is the only one with any sense,
and everyone knows the moon can do nothing.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
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Joanna Solfrian: “I write to impose a structure: Take that, chaos, quatrains! I write to disturb a structure: O toddler glazed with television, I pen you sniffing a wolf’s maw. Most days I don’t understand the reason I’m writing.” (website)

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November 3, 2014

“Satori” by Mark Smith-SotoPosted by

Mark Smith-Soto

SATORI

In the budding white morning I crawl
out of bed and wander barefoot down
the stairs and yawn into the kitchen
where you’re making coffee, and I
see a woman making coffee and wearing
what must be my red shirt, and I watch
her move sternly as if I shouldn’t be there,

or as if I should be remembering to be polite,
because truth is I’m just then getting
my bearings, wondering why everything
shines so clear, the rhombus of sun
on the oak table, the copper fan stuttering
overhead, and I watch as she walks
to the fridge and pulls and disappears
 
behind the door, disappears except
for the red sleeve I almost recognize,
and the curled fingers on the handle
that I know I must now go up and touch,
and it comes to me then that I have
wandered in my life from dream to dream,
with a lotus of awakening about to open.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
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Mark Smith-Soto: “Growing up in Costa Rica, I began to love poetry listening to family members recite the work of Alfonsina Storni and Rubén Darío around the dinner table. I didn’t always understand the verses, but they sounded beautiful to me, and I knew that someday I would want to write some of my own.” (website)

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October 30, 2014

“The Alteration of Love” by Myra ShapiroPosted by

Myra Shapiro

THE ALTERATION OF LOVE

I was crying—I mean
tears came—about love,
old love, long marriage
spilling past impediments of
who wants what for dinner or
in the bedroom—ins and outs
my father’s coarse humor

made a joke of: you put it in,
you pull it out, the story’s over,
only in Yiddish it rhymed,
words I don’t recall. Over,
he is. So is my mother. We
were never to be them.
Now they want me

to stop crying. I was trying
to say something about love—
how one day one of us
will disappear. That’s when
my eyes hauled up the sea,
and my mother and father came
to make a child of me.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
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Myra Shapiro: “These days I can’t get over being old. It’s new to me, that my life like a book has to end. And because I’ve always lived in books, lines and phrases others have written stay close to me. Shakespeare’s ‘Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds’ spoke as I tried to grasp how fragile a very old marriage is.”

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October 29, 2014

“Valediction, on Arriving in a Distant Land” by Eric Paul ShafferPosted by

Eric Paul Shaffer

VALEDICTION, ON ARRIVING IN A DISTANT LAND

I am not one to travel with no destination. No city or continent
charms me with the vague glee of flight. Nor would I go alone,
for every day, we wake warmth to warmth, your breath in my ear,

my hand on your thigh. Yesterday, the planet bowed before us,
and cool distance clarified a curve measurable in miles, in feet
pacing dutifully through the world. I’ve crossed deserts and seas,

rivers and peaks from which the waters flow, the sun westering
and a moon pierced by sky while morning melts into noon. All
space intensifies, blue, absolute, definite and dismal, magnified

by our finite human measures when we mark our roads with signs
and lines and lights that regulate. Even now, with old mountains
at my back and a thin river lost in a valley of dust, I am with you.

The rays from stars cascade through darkness limitless and lit
too little. Light is slow beside the speed with which my thoughts
turn to you. And no world is large enough to come between us.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
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Eric Paul Shaffer: “I love love poems, yet my theory is that the more love poems composed, the fewer good love poems there are. So I watch for and seek good ones. To no one’s surprise, the English Renaissance is a great place to look. I particularly admire Sir John Suckling, who had the courage to rhyme ‘heart’ with ‘fart’ (surely a telling match) and John Donne, a great master, whose compass in ‘A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning’ is magical. My poem is about arriving in my beloved town of Albuquerque without my beloved.”

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October 28, 2014

“Bright Red Bit” by Charlotte SeleyPosted by

Charlotte Seley

BRIGHT RED BIT

When our beta died, we dumped him
bowl and all into the Susquehanna. O
I was so sad without a fish. The dark bellowing
ring in the wood where the bowl once was—
Why didn’t we save even one marble?
As I sprinkled his food into the river, Jeff said
You killed it and I knew he didn’t mean the fish.
Sometimes I’d walk down Hawley if only
to see if a bowl was floating in the glints
of diurnal water. I like to think our fish is in
the river now and I swear I saw a bright red bit
at the bottom, unlike how we found him—
cadaver grey. When I die, I do not really want
my possessions with me down there, returned to earth.
Just stuff I pulverized into a nurturing. My home,
for one, as rotten as it was. The red Solo cups
on the porch, the secondhand bed, dirty
tube socks and loose threads of tobacco in the carpet.
I left before the flood but I hoped our fish
would come back, a message in a bottle
uncorked. The message might’ve said: Always
be an endless stream of regeneration,
which was sad since that was impossible
for us. We were more like the glass bowl, might’ve been
screaming until it broke. I was always underwater
with our fish swimming through the little crevices of
the plastic castle and the rainbow flakes of food,
the debris in the river and the cardboard boxes full
of things I could never take with me when I die.
If I could give you a message from the Susquehanna,
it would say that there’s a limit to perseverance.
How our fish must’ve known his sighs were numbered
when I noticed his tattered fins as fragile as broken harps
while unhooking frames from the wall, packing boxes.
That fish was what I loved about the Southern Tier
and there is nothing like the love for something
that will never love you back.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
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Charlotte Seley: “I’m not sure why I write but I know it began with Robert Creeley. And even that is a poor response since what drew me to Creeley was the clever way he broke his lines and forced the reader to think of all the words that weren’t there or perhaps fell off in the enjambment. Nonetheless, it’s an obsession now, and I served as poetry editor and editor-in-chief of Redivider and I am a current poetry reader for Ploughshares.”

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