Devotion by Ocean Vuong

      Instead, the year begins

with my knees

      scraping hardwood,

another man leaving

      into my throat. Fresh snow

crackling on the window,

      each flake a letter

from an alphabet

      I’ve shut out for good.

Because the difference

      between prayer & mercy

is how you move

      the tongue. I press mine

to the navel’s familiar

      whorl, molasses threads

descending toward

      devotion. & there’s nothing

more holy than holding

       a man’s heartbeat between

your teeth, sharpened

      with too much

air. This mouth the last

      entry into January, silenced

with fresh snow crackling

      on the window.

& so what—if my feathers

      are burning. I

never asked for flight.

      Only to feel

this fully, this

      entire, the way snow

touches bare skin—& is,

      suddenly, snow

no longer.

Natural Law by Babette Deutsch

If you press a stone with your finger, 

Sir Isaac Newton observed, 

The finger is also 

Pressed by the stone. 

But can a woman, pressed by memory’s finger, 

In the deep night, alone, 

Of her softness move 

The airy thing 

That presses upon her 

With the whole weight of love? This 

Sir Isaac said nothing of.

"I used to worry about being like this...but now...now I don't worry any more."

❤️

Litany by Elise Paschen

To light the dark

of you where no

light has explored,

to trek the deserts,

accept mirages,

swim gulfs, inhabit

the islands, caves,

the rooms and alcoves

of you, the chambers,

to chart the arteries, 

to join the valves, 

the bolts, the nails,

to open windows,

to hazard exits, 

fall through trap floors,

to upend drawers,

slam doors, to shatter

the glass of you,

but most of all, 

awake or sleeping,

to learn to say:

No more to you.

Angling by Elise Paschen

And I let the fish go. 

Elizabeth Bishop

I let him go

as if he were

a fish I'd let

slip into water.

Cupping him in

my hands, his silver

wriggling and spit,

the sun had caught

his wet, flecked skin,

his breath, no breath,

the opening, closing

of gills, that grin.

I had removed

the hook from which

he'd swung with such

momentous grace.

But wasn't I snared?

That look, that flash

as I tossed him back,

alive, in air.

On my mind

"I do what gnaws at me."

___________ and the snow flees like eloping brides

into rain. The imperceptible change begins

out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new

craving, spring. May your desire always overcome

 

your need; your story that you have to tell,

enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world

you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging

from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things

 

fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because

now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting

the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything

wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I

 

vigilant. 

I Love Your Crazy Bones by Barton Sutter

Even your odds and ends. 

I love your teeth, crazy bones, 

Madcap knees and elbows. 

Forearm and backhand 

Hair makes you animal. 

Rare among things. 

The small of your back could pool rain 

Into water a main might drink. Perfect, 

From the whirlpools your fingers print 

On everything you touch 

To the moons on the nails of all ten toes 

Rising and setting inside your shoes 

Wherever you go.

Lucia by Ravi Shankar

My hair, voluminous from sleeping in

six different positions, redolent with your scent,

helps me recall that last night was indeed real,

that it's possible for a bedspread to spawn

a watershed in the membrane that keeps us

shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure,

that I didn't just dream you into being.

You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,

give my hands their one true purpose,

find in my shoulder a groove for your head.

In a clinch, you're clenched and I'm pinched,

 we're spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched

 

in a chestnut by a mob of our own making,

only to be resurrected to stage several revivals

that arise from slightest touch to thwart

deep sleep with necessities I never knew

I knew until meeting you a few days

or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.

I have to tell you, 

there are times when 

the sun strikes me 

like a gong, 

and I remember everything, 

even your ears.

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look 

into each other’s eyes more, 

and also to appease the mutes, 

the government has decided 

to allot each person exactly one hundred   

and sixty-seven words, per day. 

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   

without saying hello. In the restaurant   

I point at chicken noodle soup. 

I am adjusting well to the new way. 

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond, 

I know she’s used up all her words,   

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times. 

After that, we just sit on the line   

and listen to each other breathe.

Singles Cruise

It was a singles cruise but it wasn’t a singles cruise:

each participant simulated detachment but none

was actually single. Some, like the recently widowed,

were attached to ghosts. Others were legally attached

to a living person they once but no longer loved.

A surprising number loved their partners profoundly

while fearing said partners inhabited the category

of those who loved them no longer. These participants,

whose fears may or may not have been founded,

attempted to self-protect by labeling themselves single.

Soon a pattern emerged: those who feared abandonment

developed around them a planetary-like orbit

of potential new partners to whom they could not attach

because they were already attached. Such orbits lasted,

sometimes, for years. The orbiters went to self-help groups

and/or analysts and/or wrote letters to advice columnists.

Because they could not detach from their objects of unrequited

affection, they became the predominant clientele for future

singles cruises, unilaterally sustaining the singles cruise business.

I like myself when I'm around you...