“The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy,” Jeffrey McDaniel.

elmemorioso:

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice
the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end

of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds
of women—those you write poems about

and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction

lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., 
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast

as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power

never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, 
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, 

as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed
antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long

regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don’t know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light

of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, 
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing

into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn’t make the silence
any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses

I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out

of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years

to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate

to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

The Last Love Letter from an Entomologist

clapee:

by Jared Singer

dear sarah
i’m sorry
we have to get a divorce
i know that seems like a really odd way to start a love letter but let me explain:
it’s not you
it’s definitely not me
it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do
i love you far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species
i’m going to leave you now, while i still remember you fondly

i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night
i know you would never do anything, you never do but..
i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night

did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys her receptors for pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they can never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that is dedication.

after i broke up with elizabeth we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together
like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away

after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down
while he still has control over his motor functions
he flops onto his back, offers his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift
she then proceeds to lovingly, so lovingly dice him into tiny cubes
spooning every morsel into her mouth
she wastes nothing
even the exoskeleton is devoured
she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them
now that is selflessness

i could never do that for you

so i have a new plan
i’m gonna leave you now
i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices
i hope you do the same
i will jay walk at every opportunity
i will steal things i could easily afford
i will be rude to strangers
i hope you do the same
i hope reincarnation is real
i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures
i hope we are reborn as flies
so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.

© pedalingtowards

three of cups by Marty McConnell

ephemerals:

at some point it becomes true that all stories
are love stories. all making, love making.
I didn’t make this rule. but it binds me
all the same. I wish there were a law
against condescending against love. against
the economy of fear that says your joy
means less joy for me as if love
were pie, or money, or fossil fuel
dug or pumped from the earth, gone
when it’s gone. it’s just not true. the heart
with its gift for magnificent expansion
is not coal. not fruit set to spoil or the dollar
cringing in its wallet. when you say darling,
the world lights up at its edges. when mouths
find mouths and minds follow or minds find
minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow –
how about you call that sacred. how about you raise
your veined right hand and swear on the blood
that branches there, yes. I take this crush
to be my lawful infatuation. I will bend toward joy
until the bending’s its own pleasure. I will memorize
photographs and street maps, I will acquiesce
to the maudlin urgency of pop songs and dance,
and dance – there’s a perfection only the impossible kiss
possesses. there are notes you can only hear naked
in the dark of a room to which you will never
return. anything that moves the world toward light
is a blessing. why not take it with both hands,
lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this
is the substance that holds our little atoms together
into bodies. this sweet paste of longing
is all that binds us to the earth.
and all we know of the gods.

(Source: btlrb)

Marriage by Lawrence Raab

astrophysicists / whenwetalkaboutlove

Years later they find themselves talking 
about chances, moments when their lives 
might have swerved off 
for the smallest reason. 
What if 
I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning? 
What if you’d been out, 
as you were when I tried three times 
the night before? 
Then she tells him a secret. 
She’d been there all evening, and she knew 
he was the one calling, which was why 
she hadn’t answered. 
Because she felt— 
because she was certain—her life would change 
if she picked up the phone, said hello, 
said, I was just thinking 
of you. 
I was afraid, 
she tells him. And in the morning 
I also knew it was you, but I just 
answered the phone 
the way anyone 
answers a phone when it starts to ring, 
not thinking you have a choice.

Full Moon & Little Frieda

foxyeahtedhughes:

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket—

And you listening.
A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming—mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath—
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.

‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

—Ted Hughes.

Electra on Azalea Path by Sylvia Plath

lovingsylvia:

via

***

When Otto Plath died in 1940, Sylvia and Warren didn’t attend his funeral. They also never visited his grave as children and Sylvia avoided it for the next 19 years. In March 1959, she visited Otto’s grave for the first time and this visit prompted her to write (surprise! surprise! NOT “Daddy”), but…

Electra on Azalea Path

The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering --
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
When I wormed back under my mother’s heart.

Small as a doll in my dress of innocence
I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.
Nobody died or withered on that stage.
Everything took place in a durable whiteness.
The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.
I found your name, I found your bones and all
Enlisted in a cramped stone askew by an iron fence.

In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead
Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower
Breaks the soil. This is Azalea Path.
A field of burdock opens to the south.
Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.
The artificial red sage does not stir
In the basket of plastic evergreens they put
At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,
Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:
The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.

Another kind of redness bothers me:
The day your slack sail drank my sister’s breath
The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry
A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;
My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.

The stony actors poise and pause for breath.
I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
It was the gangrene ate you to the bone
My mother said: you died like any man.
How shall I age into that state of mind?
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death.

A STRUGGLE TOWARDS CARELESSNESS

geographysucks:

We drive through our city and marvel
that it is ours. Everything is unlimited promise.

There is no way to distinguish faith from hope: both
equally wasteful as far as emotions go. As if
any emotion isn’t wasteful. Being human is
fucking terrible. If I was born a tree I would not
know how to miss other trees in the forest. I hope
to hear from you but I don’t. I hope to feel nothing
in exchange for nothing but instead I fill up.

I don’t want more of you. I want all of you.
You look pained when you come. Women are taught
the orgasm attaches her to him and yet.
I hope to feel anything but feel very little.

Then there must be something wrong.

No. Everything is okay. I am approaching carelessness,
that large horizon of neutrality.

We kissed and your stubble
rubbed my face raw. I care less and less about when this will
reoccur. If I cry it is once, still laughing and drunk on Texas beer,
in Caroline’s car, the sun only beginning to set.
I smoke cigarettes on the porch with the men. I do not care
for feeling.

We will meet again; this city is
small and overgrown. I will ask for your name; I have forgotten
you except your face and the angle in which you slept.

Someday, I am certain, I will learn
the act of remembering: to form that into love.