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