When I started writing poetry in high school, the first hundred or so poems were no doubt about love—the loss of it, the unrequited crush, the infatuation with that first love, attempts at writing about physical intimacy, and an extra embarrassing one I distinctly remember about why some guy would ever want to date me when he could date the homecoming queen instead. (I know now that the answer is: I'm awesome.)
In the first real poetry class I took, we were gently discouraged from writing about love because "it's so overdone." It's all been said. Fair enough, I guess. But I was really into John Donne and wanted to write my own aubades. I wanted to write adoring, lilting lines about my new boyfriend and his distinctive nose and surprisingly hairless chest. But I had gotten the message: no one really wants to read that.
It's probably true that everything you could say in a love poem has been "said" to some degree, and felt, and thought, by someone else. But that's all the more reason to write a love poem. Say it differently. The beauty of a good love poem, I think, is the writer's ability to mine the emotion of love to find something fresh.
With Valentine's Day less than a week away, I gathered twenty-one of the best love poems around by contemporary poets for your reading pleasure. I think it's clear that no two of these poems even come close to saying "the same thing" about love. Some are sad. Love comes with death and loss and yearning. Some are funny because love (and especially sex) is weird. Some are a little off-the-wall and oddballish, but they're so lovely in their quirky ways. Some are more like anti-love poems. Some are doting and talk about that beautiful soul-consuming love that I so wished for when I read Donne. All are honest, and all are emotionally resonant. I hope you enjoy these, and maybe you'll even find a poem you want to read to your Valentine.
Angela Ball
Intercourse After Death Presents Special Difficulties
I love you, I want to have sex
with you. It is so damned awkward.
So many explanations
required, having to stare down
the salacious and insist
on a conjugal visit to the after-
life. Nothing like a movie: some sexy actress
roped in pearls, masturbating to a dime-store
photograph. Nothing like ancient Egypt, men with false
penises attached to their mummies, action ready.
Just us, equipped with pairs of shadow towels and
toothbrushes, an immense bedchamber kitted out
for the impossible, the invisible,
the never-again, the at-no-time.
Nights I ingest the pill
that lets me seem awake while in motion
at home and at work. I note
today’s horoscope:
“a far-fetched hope is realized.”
Forthcoming in Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
Second Elegy
The first death was attended by a joke photo
of the actor, Don Knots, as Barney Fife.
Gun drawn.
The second by daughter, sister-in-law,
partner, and sidelined ventilator.
It is fitting that widows, like the Veuve Clicquot
make bubbly. They know the value
of good air.
During the Vietnam War, Michael sued the State
for the return of his body, won. No suit
this time.
No State can return his eyes, hazel
of unknown provenance,
macedonia of green, brown, gold,
the gift of Rayleigh scattering—that which blues
the sky.
He has fallen through stage boards into the trap room.
Been dragged by devils through a door in a rock.
Died in battle because wearing loose armor.
Heart made as if to leave
without him; then, he left,
taking heart away
from work.
It is rumored that you cross
two rivers. A ferryman conducts
the boat. In this case,
a good idea.
The male drivers of Michael’s family
shared one trait: unconditional animus
for fellow motorists. Sin of sins:
Following Too Closely. The freeway response:
Slow Down. The street response:
Pull Over Brusquely,
let the bastard pass.
Forthcoming in Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
Allison Campbell
Just adj. adv.
Can mean only: “I have just one heartstring left for you, and I’m not sure what it’s barely tethered to,” or simply: “I am just one man.”
It can mean recently and barely, “She was just here, you just missed her,” or near: “With red hair, black dress? Yeah, she sat just across the bar from me.”
It can even mean possibly: “If you leave now, you just might catch her,” or precisely: “He chose his route just right.”
It can mean almost: “I was just about to leave,” she said to him, and exactly: “That’s just what I expected.”
Just can even be very: “You’re just terrible,” she smiled, then slapped him. It can even mean fair.
The word comes from joust, and you can imagine two people-at-arms, riding on horses toward each other, then next to each other. Their lances just miss each other’s bodies. They just miss.
From Encyclopédie of the Common & Encompassing (Kore Press, 2016)
Sport n.
The trophy room is full of men, all my exes. Stuffed and still so lively. It’s a marvel how the taxidermist could get their glassy eyes just right. See how this one holds a napkin folded into the smallest duck. I love that. And this one has a cigarette. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get artificial smoke to float up and veil his blue eyes. Art can only go so far, so sometimes I come here and smoke for him.
Notice the setups, how all the bodies arch away from a fake ground where pieces of an apartment or icons of the city where we lived are touchstones for their boots or tennis shoes. The apparel is realistic but nonsensical; not one of them was a rancher or athlete.
I met them in the woods, and we tracked each other. There was always some beauty. A puzzling of light through leaves, all very verdant and hopeful. Then, eventually, it ended. I moved on with the dead weight of them stretched over my shoulders, bleeding, or being dragged behind my feet. Each time, I left something of myself in the great outdoors.
Now, I keep them as proof— proof of what?—of me living my own mistakes out on the hunt. Me, camouflaged in alcohol and shooting—not at anything that moved—but looking at someone specific and then closing my eyes as I pulled the trigger.
From Encyclopédie of the Common & Encompassing (Kore Press, 2016)
Tom Holmes
“A Corpse of Vortices” – Sophie’s Last Coherent Journal Entry to Henri from the County Mental Hospital, Barnwood Rural District, Gloucester
After they kill me –
they’ll bury me a pauper
despite my money and Our Work –
which they’ll steal or auction
Before I’m murdered and buried –
I’ll swallow handfuls of sunflower seeds –
with my tongue – I’ll swirl them to a fury –
when I’m incapable of a future –
they’ll burst from my mouth
You can find me when the sun is up –
but don’t come when the moon is lit
unless it’s at your back –
When you arrive – I’ll disperse
in energized colors and cones
the vortex of our form
(First appeared in Crab Creek Review)
Brandi George and Michael Barach
Collaborative poems
Love Letter 13: “The World’s Darkening Never Reaches to the Light of Being”
I hear the shot before I see the clay pigeon shatter. Touch me
with your hands that never shot a gun. Trust the God
who speaks like a bomb.
Anyone levitating outside the window
can see paint in your hair. Trees hover over fields
like threadbare blankets as the sky moans, lashed through branches.
I am a dogsled bumping after you.
I live inside your hoodie.
When the airplane skitters, my friends are as real to me
as magazine covers. When I watch you shave,
I turn to hair rinsing down the drain; I snatch your face
refracted in the opening mirror. And if there is poison
in the lip I suck, it does nothing to me, but later, tasting iron,
I cry and cry.
A child finally reaches the top of a maple,
casts her magic blue cape to the ground. Now she is afraid.
In the swollen night, forest creatures conspire to steal our vodka.
Fresh snow, like bread, dazzles the eye with motion: Friend,
you’re waving to me! Your fists are the outsides of apples.
When dusk scoots like a Zamboni into its den,
we hunch under the blankets, two hominids marking
each other’s necks with spit graffiti. I wash my face,
smooth wrinkles, gloss my lips.
Roots spark between us.
Sorcerers never wore sneakier shoes.
(First appeared in 32 Poems)
77. Mitosis, There Are No Mysteries Too Big
When I open my mouth to cry I give you
all my colors, and from Abel’s first blood puddle,
you paint fire in the trees. Canticle lips
kneel me in the water. I see now
I will become a soul whose face emerges
over tractor parts rubbled in the field,
which smells like sweet alfalfa—everything—
I am inside a painting that is the world
to laugh against or too small to worship now.
On the other side, voices are breaking in song
and sand—soft for gods to lay their cheeks.
It’s winter, the moon slips like a sponge
as our limbs entwine, grind to interstellar dust,
and lake mud gorging on my toes I love
radiates from your bones as sun-warmed grass,
flute music sloshing in my throat,
me a dragon, I don’t know how soon—
was it summer, the cicadas out?
I have whispered spells over your hair.
(First appeared in Seneca Review)
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Everybody’s a Picasso
The tongue can be recreated, as can the cheek,
the scalp, the nose. Parts of the body relocated
to necessary service, rendering the doctors all
into Picassos. I’ve had my eye transferred
to my chin so I can read the fine print. My foot
moved next to my ear so I can hear myself walking
home at night. My lips are now on my forehead
so you don’t have to slouch when you kiss me goodbye.
Every new configuration makes the world look twice,
but I am the queen of efficiency. I came out
like a two-headed cat with one of the heads missing.
I have been looking at it ever since. I am waiting
for the kind of love that comes in a transformer kit,
wielded by one who will put all my parts back
where they belong. One who listens to my own
footsteps for me. Who lends me his eyes.
From The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2016)
Manuals for Trains
I was born with a train in my ear, its pitched
blast invading my body like a tuba-parasite.
Each conductor has a signature move.
I fell in love with the throating of the 3 am–
his consecutive wails warp my dreams
and choke them into new directions.
On holidays, I can’t sleep, wait
for the schedule, long for the surprise
of delay, a new man at the helm making
his mark on my landscape without ever
leaving a footprint. Not once seeing
my face in sleep even though I conjure
each him, how he feels in the power of speed
breaking the black with fierce bursts.
I am an echo chamber for passengers
headed somewhere else.
They never stop for me, never open
their doors, just power
through these crossroads without
even a wave to my waiting.
(First appeared in Switchback; forthcoming in Sometimes We're All Living in a Foreign Country)
David Kirby
Always Something There to Remind Me
It’s 1992. Bosnia tries to break away from Yugoslavia, and its capital city,
Sarajevo, is surrounded by Serbian soldiers who kill nearly 12,000 people,
though not this one teenager, a journalist now, who lived communally
in a basement with other youngsters. The boys would go off to fight
and then return to the girls, who lived there full-time. They slept together
on mattresses on the floor and ate together and fell in and out of love,
as young people do, and talked about literature and told jokes and,
since some of them had brought instruments, staged their own concerts.
I wonder what they played. When I was their age, so many songs
had utopian titles: “Share the Land,” “Get Together,” “People Got
to Be Free.” What were you thinking, Grass Roots, Youngbloods,
Young Rascals? Later if I wondered if we were that stupid,
and then I thought, no, we just wanted hope, wanted to stop our war,
let everyone vote, get a cup of coffee at any lunch counter, anywhere.
When the teenager was wounded in a bombing, her parents
smuggled her into Italy to recuperate, but she was so unhappy there
she had herself smuggled back to Sarajevo, which was even harder
than leaving it. Their war ended. Today new buildings dot the city’s skyline,
and there are even tourists. The girl and her friends grew up, got jobs,
started families. Life got better, though not in the way they thought.
Bad Boyfriend Poems
Welcome to the Warehouse! The Warehouse is not actually a warehouse
but a venue for poetry readings,
and tonight a young woman is reading poems about how awful
her boyfriend is, even though she wants to marry him.
Last week, another young woman read, not poems, but a story
about a boyfriend who slept with girls he barely knew yet always
came back to her, and she let him.
The week before that, a young woman read poems about how much
she loves her boyfriend,
who sounded like a charming fellow, at least in the poems, though
this week he broke up with her.
Sometimes the young women read poems that aren’t bad boyfriend poems,
often prefacing or following these by saying,
“This poem will appear in such and such a magazine” or “That poem appeared
in so and so,”
though they never say that about the bad boyfriend poems.
Have you ever seen a bad boyfriend poem in a magazine?
Oh, right, there’s Carolyn Kizer’s “Bitch,” Terri Ann Thaxton’s “Getaway Girl,”
and Marge Piercy’s “The Friend.”
The best title of any bad boyfriend poem is “The Stupid Jerk I’m Obsessed With”
by Maggie Estep,
and the best bad boyfriend poem overall is Julie Sheehan’s “Hate Poem,”
though “Hate Poem” could apply to anyone, not just a boyfriend.
There are also excellent bad boyfriend poems by Kim Addonizio,
Cate Marvin, Denise Duhamel, Erika Meitner, Amy Newman,
and Louise Glück,
and Margaret Atwood’s bad boyfriend poem “You Fit Into Me” is so short
that I may as well quote it here in its entirety:
“You fit into me / like a hook into an eye // a fish hook / an open eye.”
Note that these are all first-rate poets as well as slightly older ones,
meaning they know how to write well about anything.
Young women, wait a few years. There are lots of other things
to write about: work, family, nature.
Write about sports. Write about travel, hardware stores, extraterrestrial beings,
food.
And work on your relationships. Who’s a good boyfriend? No one
comes to mind, really.
Jesus and the Buddha were good men, but they didn’t have girlfriends.
And you know what they say: the good ones are already taken.
This suggests that the best women take, not bad men, but careless
or indifferent men and turn them into good ones.
To turn an indifferent man into a good man might be a better public service
than writing a poem. Or I know, do both.
Paul Bone
Old-fashioned Love
I would have traded button holes for zippers.
Would you, in love back then in sepia town?
Would you have held the bloody kerchief while
I coughed into it? We can still imagine
afflictions were a kind of lyricism,
that if you slipped a buffalo nickel
into the slotted pupil of a goat’s eye
you might get back a murmur in your lungs
instead of all these shallow knifey breaths.
Allow the planet unillumined, too.
See us there like original creatures
in those days just before the streetlamps
diluted all the living constellations,
agog as every night the gods retrenched
the delta of the galaxy in colors
most like the beautiful diseased parts of us.
I’d likely now be helping you in
the little gum tree canoe I’d hatcheted.
We’d do away with pretense since the stars
bend all the way down to the lake to catch us.
We toss our straw hats on the water or
the sky and row, admiring the little infant graves
lined up along the cemetery shore,
legible even in the cedar shade.
Rob Griffith
Lexicon
That Eskimos have forty words for “snow”
is surely myth, but it’s true they have
eight ways to say “chagrin” and a look that means
“Come hither, but not that close.” And southerners
have six for “ribs,” four for “Faulkner,” and one
particularly expressive shrug that says,
“The bathroom is farther down the concourse.”
In Indiana, Hoosiers have only “corn,”
one round word to express their hopes and fears,
their earnest love or depthless grief. One time,
in Arkansas, fishing in an Ozark stream,
I heard a choir of mockingbirds say “joy,”
but dialect is hard, and their inflections
might have meant “rain” or “wind” or “sun.”
Now, everywhere I go, I listen
and tuck these words away. In pockets, wallet,
and suitcase, they sit and wait for use. I need
them all. There’s things I need to say to you.
(First appeared in Southern Indiana Review)
Adam Vines
The Golden Years
I said, “The jasmine blooms along the fence.”
You set the cuckoo clocks to different times.
The bird in the hall is thirteen minutes slow.
You devil some eggs, spread out the greens to dry.
You set the cuckoo clocks to different times.
“It’s Sunday; the mailman doesn’t come today.”
You devil some eggs, spread out the greens to dry.
You dress your childhood dolls in faded clothes.
“It’s Sunday; the mailman doesn’t come today,”
you said. “Tomorrow, we’ll have chicken and rice.”
You dress your childhood dolls in faded clothes.
You brush your hair, push back your cuticles.
You said, “Tomorrow, we’ll have chicken and rice.
Your sister called again. Your hands are filthy.”
You brush your hair, push back your cuticles,
take out your book, ready yourself for bed.
“Your sister called again. Your hands are filthy.”
The bird in the hall is thirteen minutes slow.
“Take out your book, ready yourself for bed,”
I said. The jasmine blooms along the fence.
(First appeared in Mead)
Erica Dawson
Love poem after learning hair is dead skin
I want to pin you down so I can drift
Onto your shoulders. I want you to say
Your dermis is so pretty. Never wear
A do-rag. Grow it out. Go natural.
This is the moment when we refurbish ourselves.
Rising and falling, dust and dander, mites.
We need a black light and a microscope.
I want to see you shed. I want your sheath.
(First appeared in North Dakota Quarterly)
Slow-wave Sleep with a Fairy Tale
I knocked out Sleeping Beauty, fucking cocked
her on the jaw. She fell into the brier.
Pussy. I found her prince. I up and socked
him, too. I called each one of them a liar.
I damned the spindle’s hundred years of sleep
because I rarely sleep. I cursed the birds
who took their heads from out beneath their heap
of wings. When lovers look, they need no words.
and when a hound came running after me,
a Redbone with a smile bearing its teeth
so white, I woke up with the majesty
of princesses who lie there underneath
a spell of something better still to come.
My eyes were blurry, my mouth dry and dumb.
(First appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, then Best American Poetry 2015)
Caki Wilkinson
Philter
A nip won’t do—I want a scud
in one fell swoop from tongue to blood;
I want combustion, torque resynced
with quicker kick; I want the flood.
I want the hymns a rut unstrums,
the muddy hum the want becomes,
and lickerish viscosity.
It’s freezing here. Deliver me,
this rusted engine, rotors inked
with grease, whatever stroke or part
it takes to run a pre-owned heart.
(First appeared in The Yale Review)
Come to Think of It
The way he got excited
lying in her bed
explaining jazz
was not the compliment
she took it as.
From The Wynona Stone Poems (Persea Books, 2015)
Barbara Hamby
Ganymede’s Dream of Rosalind
Girlfriend, I am the boyfriend you never had—honeysuckle mouth,
indigent eyes, no rough Barbary beard when kissing me. Popinjay,
keep me in your little chest, nestle me in your cosy love hotel,
my mouthful of tangy violets, my pumpkin raviolo, my spoon
of crushed moonlight in June. On your breast let me sup,
quaff the nectar of your sweet quim, trim repository of dear
succulence. Only touch my cheek with your hand, and let
us again meet as we did that first time in Act II, scene iv
when we ran away to the Forest of Arden. Rough sphinx,
you know my heart, because it’s yours, too, and quartz,
altogether transparent stone. I yearn for you as a crab
craves the wet sand, a wildebeest the vast savannah, a toad
every mudhole and mossy shelf. Forget Orlando. I’ll marry myself.
From All-Night Lingo Tango (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009)
Zeus, It’s Your Leda, Sweetie Pie
Zip up your toga, thunder thighs, that’s Hera
barking like Cerberus on amphetamines. I was a skeptic,
don’t you know, but you’ve got the equipment, as the
frigging king of the gods should. All the mortal gals are agog,
hinting for an invite to our next divine date, as if I
jump in your Cadillac, and we race toward a three-star snack,
lightning bolts setting the highway ablaze miles ahead. I’m
nervous about your wife. She blinded Teresias, and Apollo
plays possum when she’s around. Zeus, that’s your cue–
reassure me. Don’t think I want to move to Mt. Olympus.
Those relics are a snooze. Athena, there’s dust on her tutu,
Venus’s, too, so get a move on, or my Helen will wow
exactly no one and his horse. Let’s dillydally, Ding-Dong Daddy.
From All-Night Lingo Tango (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009)
L. Lamar Wilson
Dear Uncle Sam
He’s not your type.
He kisses men with eyes
open, talks with them
shaded or averted
to acquiescent asses.
When cordoned
& questioned, he laughs.
Beware. His laughter beguiles.
Beware. He never shoots
straight. Always curls
fetal in the arms of any one
who can still him. Never sleeps
alone. Give him a gun,
& he may turn it into a prop
for a plié. Give him a gun,
& he may turn it on himself
& every fool who believes you.
He’s claimed bodies in every
major city east of Chicago, saw mine
heaving among strobe-lit throng
& marked me: his sweat clinging
to my nape, our silhouettes
on bedroom walls,
now a mirage blurred
by desert dunes, now
only the caress of lines
hardened hands scrawl:
I’ll be home next
month … I’ll be home
next year … I’ll be
… I’ll …
(First appeared in THEthe Poetry blog)
Author Bios
Angela Ball teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her sixth book of poems, Talking Pillow, will appear from the University of Pittsburgh Press in fall of 2017.
Michael Barach teaches writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. His poetry is published in The Cincinnati Review, Meridan, and River Styx, He is the Co-Poetry Editor of Juked.
Paul Bone is the author of the poetry collections Momentary Vision of the Assistant Meteorologist and Nostalgia for Sacrifice. He teaches writing at the University of Evansville and is Co-Editor of Measure Press and Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry.
Allison Campbell is the author of the poetry collection Encyclopédie of the Common & Encompassing (Kore Press, 2016). She lives in New Orleans and teaches creative writing at Lusher Charter School. Her work has appeared in such places as The Cincinnati Review, Witness, Rattle, Court Green, Harpur Palate, and Armchair/Shotgun.
Erica Dawson is the author of two collections of poetry: Big-Eyed Afraid and The Small Blades Hurt. She is an associate professor at The University of Tampa, and is the director of UT's low-residency MFA.
Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon 2016) and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon 2012), a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her third collection of poetry, Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in Fall 2017. Her poems have appeared such places as Ploughshares, Guernica, New England Review, 32 Poems, and the Harvard Review. Co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine Memorious, she is the Jacob Ziskind Poet in Residence at Brandeis University. She lives in Cambridge, MA and Hattiesburg, MS.
Brandi George’s first collection of poetry, Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) won the gold medal in the 2015 Florida Book Awards. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Columbia Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, and Prairie Schooner. She currently teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Rob Griffith’s latest book, The Moon from Every Window (David Robert Books, 2011), was nominated for the 2013 Poets’ Prize; and his previous book, A Matinee in Plato's Cave, was the winner of the 2009 Best Book of Indiana Award. His work has appeared in PN Review, Poetry, The North American Review, Poems & Plays, The Oxford American, and many others. He is the editor of the journal Measure and is chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Evansville, Indiana.
Barbara Hamby is the author of five books of poems, most recently On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry and her book of short stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Yale Review. She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.
Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics and the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Cave (winner of The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013), as well as four chapbooks. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break. Twitter: @TheLineBreak
David Kirby's collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” Kirby’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His latest poetry collection is Get Up, Please.
Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he is Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review. He is the author of Out of Speech (forthcoming, LSU Press, 2018), The Coal Life (U of Arkansas P, 2012), and coauthor of According to Discretion (Unicorn Press, 2015). During the summers, he is on staff at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collections Circles Where the Head Should Be (UNT Press, 2011), which won the Vassar Miller Prize, and The Wynona Stone Poems (Persea, 2015), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. She lives in Memphis, TN.
L. Lamar Wilson is the author of Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013) and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), with the Phantastique Five. He’s a recipient of fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Callaloo Writing Workshops, and the Blyden and Roberta Jackson Fund at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he’s completing a doctorate in African American and multi-ethnic American poetics. Wilson, an Affrilachian Poet, teaches creative writing and African American literature at The University of Alabama.
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