four love poems
What says “love” better than poetry? Four of the Boshemia team share their latest love poems for Valentine’s Day 2022.
Across the Gaps
Alex Nolan
The world turns
the stars spin
the universe stretches out
Time yawns, and lazily unfurls her fingertips
across the gaps.
I am here alone.
It’s three am.
The night moves on only the hint of a breeze
and I can’t
I can’t
can’t get the
can’t get the covers straight enough.
My lip has been bleeding for the past ten minutes
where I bit
and my teeth broke the skin.
Quietly sinking and
here among too many books
here talking to myself
and not
finishing a thought
and guilt for not being
Still, we carry on through the dark,
hurtling through galactic void
as supernovas flare up and die out.
Five am and
glimmers of day.
I’m sleeping, or trying, on crumbs.
Can it stay night?
Too much day to fill
with instant coffee with too-long showers with tv binges
with repotting the plants with tidying with rearranging with laundry
with old video games with personality quizzes with dressing up
with watching from the window with remaking the bed
with only my eyes,
my hands
and this whole human body
that roots me
Here.
xxviii
sARAH laWRENCE
Your name is a sigh,
a soft, amorous moan
dripped over the tender flesh of a red-bitten lip
at the crescendo
It’s a lilting breeze across goosebumped skin
a ripple across a still lake
a river in paradise
I want to catch your moan with my lips
I'll kiss it out of you
le petit mort – la petite mort
Reflected Light
By C. C. Hawkins
My longest romantic relationship has been with the idea of the Moon
and the notion that a higher silver silent someone, to whom I am but a
speck in a blur of eternal motion, somehow knows me individually
and looks down at me as if she senses all the empty crevices within me
and wants to tell me things will be okay, in her own way, but shining is really
all she can think of, though it does the job because I’ve never had a healthier
romance than this where I can feel loved by just looking up with a quiet swoon.
MY LOVER, THE MOON
Eileen Elizabeth
I rise and break for you
How your hard moonlight dips so easily into my waves
Pull me toward the shore again and I’ll rise rise and break for you
The horizon in my throat
I’ll swallow your light and drown you