“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

John Green

“It is not so much that I miss you
as the remembering
which I suppose is a form of missing
except more positive,
like the time of the blackout
when fear was my first response
followed by love of the dark.”

Dorothea Grossman

“I thought, please don’t grow
familiar. I think I said it out loud

Please don’t let me love you
that horrible way.”

Olena Kalytiak Davis, exerpt from “All the Natural Movements of the Soul”

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,[…]
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping.

Dean Young

It’s always like this.
I catch their scent and
old feelings come around.

Wordless: 
still, we know one another,
or should.

All I want is to take my quilts,
spread them beside the porch rail,

and deep in the night,
at ease together, 
speak of longing, of love.

Xue Tao (transl. by Jeanne Larsen)

Brutal to give
the prisoner a window—
a blue sky glimpse—

as if an afterlife
existed. Brutal
for you to parade

in a body
in the same
room where I dream you.

I’ve only known you for hours. We drink together.
We drink and we get drunk. I love the liquid
feel of the buzz, the ease of the room.
I am charming when I drink. I lie
and tell stories. You smile and look at my face
when I speak. You are intense and completely mine.
I notice the lines around your eyes, the folds of your lips
when you smile.

When we dance, your chest is warm on mine. It’s hot and we sweat
and our sweat mixes through our shirts. My beard is stiff with salt
when we kiss. My hands feel your bald head. I wonder
if you’ll mind the laundry on my bedroom floor.
I wonder where you’ll go in the morning.

I relearn how to press my body
against other bodies. My slick flesh
like scales, like fish tail, hums across
men’s spines during autumn afternoons.

I teach my mouth words like sunshine,
cupcake. The mouth, once a fist,
now can’t help but smile when it wags
out these glittery promises.

My legs remember how to braid
themselves in with other legs,
hairy and sometimes freckled,
that like the gloss of my calves.

Jenny Sadre-Orafai

What does it matter
if I wore my skirt short,
my hair stacked high,
my eyeliner black and thick,

if my long earrings jangled
when I ran
and I wore a padded bra
under my gold lamée blouse
or no bra at all
under a sheer one?

When I danced naked in my apartment
or stripped on a mountain
and made love amid ferns and conifers,
I was like all
the other animals.

And I say
the body is a golden chalice
filled with guts
and menstrual blood.
Every living cell is holy,
radiant as a stained-glass window
with sunlight streaming through.

So what does it matter
how many men wanted me?
What does it matter
if I had my way?

Lucille Lang Day

Dawn is a gun shot,
but less humane.
Tell yourself
again each morning—
the bed will never
not be empty.
Being dead is easier
because it’s over—
our therapists
aren’t bullshitting.
My father located
his own crumbling bridge,
and stands underneath,
looks up. Waits
for joints to break.
Some of us
don’t need to read
the last page first:
we try to get ready.
We fail.