#Poetry

We Are Surprised by Ada Limón

Now, we take the moon into the middle of our brains

so we look like roadside stray cats with bright flashlight-white eyes

in our faces, but no real ideas of when or where to run.

We linger on the field's green edge and say, Someday, son, none of this

will be yours. Miracles are all around. We're not so much homeless

as we are home-free, penny-poor, but plenty lucky for love and leaves

that keep breaking the fall. Here it is: the new way of living with the world

inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me

are us and them, and it and sky. It's hard to believe we didn't

know that before; it's hard to believe we were so hollowed out, so drained,

only so we could shine a little harder when the light finally came.

— Bright dead things by Ada Limón (Page 42 - 43)

I want to say something but shame prevents me

yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but rather you would speak about what is just

— If Not, Winter by Sappho (Page 279)

The Trees by Jericho Brown

In my front yard live three crape myrtles, crying trees We once called them, not the shadiest but soothing During a break from work in the heat, their cool sweat

Falling into us. I don't want to make more of it. I'd like to let these spindly things be Since my gift for transformation here proves

Useless now that I know everyone moves the same Whether moving in tears or moving To punch my face. A crape myrtle is

A crape myrtle. Three is a family. It is winter. They are bare. It's not that I love them Every day. It's that I love them anyway.

— The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Page 19)

Last Days by Mary Oliver

Things are changing; things are starting to spin, snap, fly off into the blue sleeve of the long afternoon. Oh and ooh come whistling out of the perished mouth of the grass, as things turn soft, boil black into substance and hue. As everything, forgetting its own enchantment, whispers: I too love oblivion why not it is full of second chances. Now, hiss the bright curls of the leaves. Now! booms the muscle of the wind.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 410)

bare by Danez Smith

for you i'd send my body to battle my body, let my blood sing of tearing

itself apart, hollow cords of white knights' intravenous joust.

love, i want & barely know how to do much else. don't speak to me

about raids you could loose on me the clan of rebel cells who thirst

to watch their home burn. love let me burn if it means you

& i have one night with no barrier but skin. this isn't about danger

but about faith, about being wasted on your name. if love is a room

of broken glass, leave me to dance until my feet are memory.

if love is a hole wide enough to be God's mouth, let me plunge

into that holy dark & forget the color of light. love, stay

in me until our bodies forget what divides us, until your hands

are my hands & your blood is my blood & your name

is my name & his & his

— Don't Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith (Page 37)

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest.

You, drowning between my arms— stay.

You, pushing your body into the river only to be left with yourself— stay.

...

— Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Settling In by Jenny Factor

How I loved each bare floor, each naked wall, the shadows on

newly empty halls. By day, my head humming to itself of dreams, I cleaned and

scrubbed to make life new; dislodging from the corner,

the old moths and cicadas pinned to the screen, the carcasses

of grasshoppers dangling from beams, and each windowsill's clutter of

dried beetles and dead bees. But, through each opening, each closing door,

the old life returns on six legs, or spins a musty web as it roosts over

a poison pot, or descends from above to drink blood in. This is how it

happens: the settling in—the press of wilderness returns to carved-out space, to skin.

— Queer Nature by Michael Walsh

From the Greenhouse by Audre Lorde

Summer rains like my blood cries lover my lover over and over surging receding sometimes a brief sun knifing through rain like my blood speaks in alternate whispers roaring giving and taking seeking destroying beseeching green sprouts in our struggling garden blessing the earth as it suffers blind rain beating down tender sprouts in the silent mud.

My blood yells against your sleeping shoulder this is a poem of summer my blood screams at your false safety your mute body beside me driving me closer and closer you seek your own refuge farther and farther away in your dreaming the edge of our bed is approaching again rain surges against our windows green sprouts are drowning in mud and blessings in our carefully planted greenhouse I have moved as far as I can now my blood merges into your dreaming.

— The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde (Page 312)

August by Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods, in the brambles nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high branches, reaching my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark creeks that run by there is this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is this happy tongue.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 365)

Gardening Secrets of the Dead by Lee Herrick

When the light pivots, hum — not so loud the basil will know, but enough to water it with your breath. Gardening has nothing to do with names like lily or daisy. It is about verbs like uproot, traverse, hush. We can say it has aspects of memory and prayer, but mostly it is about refraction and absence, the dead long gone when the plant goes in. A part of the body. Water and movement, attention and dirt.

Once, I swam off the coast of Belize and pulled seven local kids along in the shallow Caribbean, their brown bodies in the blue water behind me, the first one holding my left hand like a root, the last one dangling his arm under the water like a lavender twig or a flag in light wind. A dead woman told me: Gardening, simply, is laughing and swimming a chorus of little brown miracles in water so clear you can see yourself and your own brown hands becoming clean.

— Gardening secrets of the dead by Lee Herrick

Spark by Mikko Harvey

A leaf declining to fall. A man hunting to kill but not to eat. On the patio last night, a telephone told stories about democracy, but I was watching your hands move. Picking up patterns. Slowly starting to see that my life was nothing more than a perch from which to be kind, like the foliage that successfully hides a turkey from a hunter. The evening's blackness frothed in the grass. The evening's mantises danced. Or at least swayed. Or at least existed. And when I thought that a small amount of liquid was about to spill over the edge of your cup, a small amount did! Simplicity: a doorknob. The freckle on your forearm.

— Let the World Have You by Mikko Harvey (Page 61 - 62)

You Stitched Together the Pauses by Brian Bilston

you stitched together the pauses

from old, discarded Harold Pinter

plays

until you had made yourself

a blanket

of

silence

— You Took the Last Bus Home by Brian Bilston (Page 188)

Funny Business by Mikko Harvey

I wonder if later I will forgive myself for having denied my loved ones demonstrations of my loving them. I was too busy demonstrating myself to the universe. I was too busy turning strangers into sites of worship. I was so, so busy considering the symbolism of the fish's boiled eyeball as it sat there on the platter. I was feeling uncomfortable in the presence of the wide smile of the holographic customer service associate. I Googled what delphiniums are. I took my shirt off and rolled around in the yard, pretending to be a little worm while actual worms were rolling around in the yard and I actually crushed one to death.

— Let the World Have You by Mikko Harvey (Page 10)

Queer Earth by Jess X. Snow

"Sexual expression is permitted only within marriage, between man and woman, male and female. Anything else is an abnormality and is against nature." — Pope Shenouda III

You speak of nature as if you invented it. Or gutted it & used its bones to fashion a white castle,

to keep you safe from all the animals you refuse to see.

Tonight, each grain of soil, each blade of grass, each droplet of blood is a time machine. Each cell

rewinds you four & a half billion years back in history. We were once genderless cells splitting our own bodies—

in two—now growing gills, fins and feet. 65,000 queer & trans species.

It's always mating season on planet Earth: look at the way leopard slugs

make love: upside down from trees—two penises coiling into orchids. A penetration

so mutual—it is worthy of bioluminescence.

Look at the way bonobo monkeys resolve conflict: queer polyamorous sex in the morning, evening, and afternoon.

Look at the penguins mating for life, warming the egg of another mother with the heat between their bellies.

When an oyster produces a perfect pearl: they transition from male to female. For crustaceans, gender is a border

that does not exist. Do you hear the orchestra of dolphins? Masturbating against the seabed, penetrating

each other's blow holes, as if this human history never began. If our love defies the logic of your biology,

then what is queer pleasure if not heavenly? Is this queer ocean not the tidal waves roaring

within your bloodstream? Is this queer Earth not the same carbon that birthed your flesh?

To be queer, Earth, and alive is to be hunted & marked wild. A beast banished from heaven,

a bleached coral reef, a jungle clear-cut, a planet domesticated like cattle, and butchered in the hands of machines.

Yet, our queerness is an ancient persistence. So tell me: we be against nature.

& our bones will remember— we've been queer for 3.6 billion springs,

summers, falls & winters. & even after your infant empire

collapses into dust, we will still be queer.

— Queer Nature by Michael Walsh (Page 274 - 276)

Coping by Audre Lorde

It has rained for five days running the world is a round puddle of sunless water where small islands are only beginning to cope a young boy in my garden is bailing out water from his flower patch when I ask him why he tells me young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.

— The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde (Page 267)