Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.

-Mary Oliver

So you see yourself as a revolving door:
a place people keep passing through
but never want to stay.
You get used to the idea of impermanence–
never fall in love without an exit strategy,
a way to untangle your heart
when they leave you.
(And they always leave you.
That part, at least,
is constant.)
When you become, instead, a dead end,
a back alley, a Do Not Enter,
they want to know why you are suddenly
unavailable.
You show them hands calloused
from all this giving–
ask if they have ever loved
a day in their life, ask
why everything you had was
never enough to satisfy.
Trouble is, you see yourself as a peace offering:
a willing body meant to keep the quiet
quiet.
And you throw yourself at every open mouth.
So your method of coping looks more like
taking your body to market
just to see who’s willing to buy it.
This is how you give yourself up in pieces, but
never notice what you’re missing.
It’s how you use sex as just
another way to hurt yourself.
How you become nameless in the face
of all the things you want in parts and pieces
but refuse to accept in full.
Love becomes a fairy tale that scares you.
Kisses, safe only in small doses–it’s dangerous
to get attached to the things that never
want you.
Or worse,
the ones who want to keep you:
like an animal, like a trophy, like
bragging rights.
When all you’ve ever wanted is somebody
who would keep you
like a promise.”

-Ashe Vernon

It is three at night.

I have something to say.

You are so valuable.

You shine out.

You are a magic star.

You are a body of blood made beautiful.

How I admire, sit back and adore you.

How thirsty I am for that.

How you feed me.

-Anne Sexton

One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That’s my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.
Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn’t live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,
I was abducted, but it sounds
wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.
Then she says, I was not abducted.
Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted
to escape my body. Even, sometimes,
I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance
wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—
she says them in rotation.
Death, husband, god, stranger.
Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.
I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can’t remember herself as that person
but she keeps thinking the pool will remember
and explain to her the meaning of her prayer
so she can understand
whether it was answered or not.

-Louise Glück