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Posts Tagged ‘romance’

How I Made It Across the State

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 3, 2022| 6 Comments »




Through sleet, then slush,
through blizzard and ice,
I drove mountain passes
and listened to a love story—
and as my hands gripped
and my shoulders tensed,
my heart cheered for forgiveness.
And as snow fell
and SUVS flipped
and semis slid,
love put its hand
on my hand on the wheel
and though it did not promise me
my own happy ending,
it did crook its finger as if to say
just one more mile, sweetheart,
in the dark current
of the world,
now one more,
now one more,
now one more.

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After Reading a Romance at Midnight

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 7, 2021| 7 Comments »


 
 

For two hours, I am the woman
who works at the orphanage, the woman
who falls in love with a man from India
who is not who he says he is.
He and I make love for hours beneath a mirror,
twining our limbs in a sea of silk,
and he shows me the pleasure
of losing the stories I’ve told myself
about what is possible with love.
When, after many pages,
we arrive at happily ever after,
I find myself on the couch in my kitchen,
notice my own thick legs curled beneath me,
my own raw heart in my tired chest
doing its faithful work. I’m surprised
to return to my own story:
the woman who is grieving—
the woman alone
in the empty room who listens
for the voice that isn’t there,
who listens for footsteps that do not come.
For the last two hours, I had forgotten her,
had forgotten this woman
whose story I know as my own,
this woman who lost her son.
I had forgotten the ache she carries,
the constant throb. And though it cuts,
though it wounds,
I am so grateful to return to her life,
to her story—the story
of how she gave her everything
to someone she loved,
how she knows he loved her, too.
It’s not a story she had wanted to live,
but now that it’s hers
she would never give up a page
of their story. Not a single word.

*

this poem has been published in ONE ART

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What’s a Formal Girl to Say with an Invitation Like That?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 9, 2014| 6 Comments »

She walks without a stutter
in her high heel books
and her low-necked poems
get her long enjambed looks.

But there’s a limp in her throat
when she thinks of him
and his hard, ripped verse
and his slant-rhymed limbs.

So she slips on her finest
red metaphors—
oh her silken triolets
are iambic whores

and sooner than swoon
all her tropes slide off
as his trochees meet her spondees
and there aren’t beats enough

for all the grooves they scan
as their feet go fractal.
Let’s free verse it, baby,
he whispers in her dactyl.

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