Ask her if she regrets anything.

I was
promised to another—
I lived with someone.
You forget these things when you’re touched.

Ask her how he touched her.

His gaze touched me
before his hands touched me.

Ask her how he touched her.

I didn’t ask for anything;
everything was given.

Ask her what she remembers.

We were hauled into the underworld.

I thought
we were not responsible
any more than we were responsible
for being alive. I was
a young girl, rarely subject to censure;

then a pariah. Did I change that much
from one day to the next?
If I didn’t change, wasn’t my action
in the character of that young girl?

Ask her what she remembers.

I noticed nothing. I noticed
I was trembling.

Ask her if the fire hurts.

I remember
we were together.
And gradually I understood
that though neither of us ever moved
we were not together but profoundly separate.

Ask her if the fire hurts.

You expect to live forever with your husband
in fire more durable than the world.
I suppose this wish was granted,
where we are now being both
fire and eternity.

Do you regret your life?

Even before I was touched, I belonged to you;
you had only to look at me.

-Louise Gluck

 

Dear Woman,
Sometimes you’ll just be too much woman
Too smart,
Too beautiful,
Too strong,
Too much of something
That makes a man feel like less of a man,
Which will make you feel like you have to be less of a woman.
The biggest mistake you can make
Is removing jewels from your crown
To make it easier for a man to carry.
When this happens, I need you to understand,
You do not need a smaller crown –
You need a man with bigger hands.

-Michael Reid

A big thank you to my Sheryl-ladycakes for sharing this earlier today. xoxo

Among all the revelry,
in the glow of the fire,
you swallowed me with a stare
and turned me inside out

With your green glass eyes
and the curve of your lips
and the taste of your skin
and the heat of your breath

You are everything like the high I get
when I’m riding my bike
through the summer evening air
and the songs ringing in my ears
have me smiling so wide
my cheeks go sore

In spite of grass stained knees
and a dozen mosquito bites,
I could listen to you talk all night
and thank the stars for keeping me alive
long enough to taste my name
on your tongue.

-M. Rockett

Blame it on Mercury
(and I don’t mean the way you taste).

I am in retrograde
speaking in tongues
sweating in reverse
and maybe if I wasn’t spinning backwards
I could conjure up the right words.
They’ve buried themselves in me somewhere
beneath twelve tons of brick.
After eighty-six hours of silence
I’m starting to wonder what my voice sounds like.
Looking down at my hands
I’m trying to recall
which way is
right
what is left
nothing
there’s nothing left.

Blame it on the dirt
(and I don’t mean the way you swallow secrets).

I am digging my own grave
burying myself in the garden
so that the world may have another sad song
about sleeping alone
and I think if the love in my heart
was made out of glass
I’d be coughing up blood by now.
My insides are shattered
but I don’t I look good?
What about from this angle?
What about when I bite my lip
bide my time
grow amongst the flowers?

Blame it on the nightmares
(and I don’t mean the way you live with your ghosts).

I am haunted just like everyone else.
My mouth is dry but maybe
I’d be a little more kissable
after another glass of whiskey
after another poem about the stars.
My heart is empty,
do you mind if I have yours?
You used to tell me I was a dream
But now you have trouble sleeping
And you don’t look at me like that anymore.

“Men do not bend over backwards to please me.
Nothing you have ever heard is true.
They would have you believe in the sway of my hips
like a siren song.

Some charlatan claimed to see the birth of Venus
in the lay of my thighs. Roses in my cheeks.

They say they dedicate their work to me.
They say they dedicate their lives to me.

But these are wholly foolish things.
This is the truth of it. Here it is with verity:

They break over their pens and their clay and their stone,
falling for the image on the easel.

They like me at a distance: elusive, radiant, mysterious.
A mess of legs and mouth. A silhouette. An idea.

A design of their own making.
Not a woman who talks too much in her sleep.

They call on me for inspiration, but nobody chasing the muse
has ever actually put down the pen long enough

to come and find me.
It is nothing if not lonely. It is nothing if not unkind.

If I had my way: every bit of marble cracked,
every inkwell run dry, every metaphor cut down before its time.

The bottoms of my feet are black from running barefoot.
My mouth is lit like a forge.

I am worth so much more
than another couple of good goddamned lines.”

-Trista Mateer

“You saw her a hundred times, but not once did you look at her.” – Gabriela Mistral

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

“Your calloused hands
And consolation kisses
Are keeping me awake.
I am filling the hollow space
In your collar bones
With empty affection
And misplaced curiosity.
I wonder what you look like
With an earthquake in your lungs
Quivering beneath the weight of
My being
Gasping for air in this sea of
Lust and longing.
In the quiet hours of the morning
When you are half asleep
I’ll kiss your neck
Behind your ear
And whisper:
Drown in me.”

-ravenous ghosts

Because someday love is going to fill you as easily as the rain fills the endless sea.
I always thought the ocean was complete until I watched it become a forever home
for terrified droplets being dispelled from the sky.

Be braver than I have been.
Don’t hide your water behind glass doors and guarded fences.
Dive all the way to the bottom without wondering what lies below.
Throw away the map and the plans and don’t worry about finding the treasure.

Be braver than I have been and allow yourself to realize
that the treasure has already found you.
Let yourself be loved.
Let yourself love.

Do not jump in the car and drive until the skies turn black and your heart feels at home.
Do not beg the airplane to stay just a moment longer in the clouds so your stomach might stay at the top and leave the butterflies in the skies where they belong.
Do not bury your face in your hands to forget the smell and taste and dance that only accompanies two souls in love.

Be braver than I have been.
Let yourself be loved.

-Macaile Hutt

Then I think of you in bed,
your tongue half chocolate, half ocean,
of the houses that you swing into,
of the steel wool hair on your head,
of your persistent hands and then
how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two.

How you come and take my blood cup
and link me together and take my brine.
We are bare. We are stripped to the bone
and we swim in tandem and go up and up
the river, the identical river called Mine
and we enter together. No one’s alone.

-Anne Sexton

Balancing Act
Today I suddenly smelled your
scent on the breeze like vapor from the bayou.
I closed my eyes and tried not to breathe
too deeply, instinctively knowing I’d lose it
in the rush of air into my lungs the same way
knew I’d lose you all those years ago
if I loved too deeply.

The tickle of your afternoon beard on my face,
the pearl white buttons nestled in the blue of your shirt,
your tanned hand with a half moon scar warm against
the curve of my waist all came back as if we’d just
parted today, still fresh as new baby skin.

I opened my eyes and the sun had burned off
the vapor and the tickle on my face
was only sweat. Your half moon scar lies
on someone else’s waist.

–Charlotte Hamrick

This week’s poetry selection comes from my friend and very talented writer, Charlotte.  Several of her poems were just published in the Camroc Press Review, so please take a few moments to read them. Or you can visit her site and see more of her writing (and photography too).

My ear attends to you,
as a mother hears in her sleep.
To a feverish child, she whispers
as I bend over you.

At the skin, my blood calls out to
your heart, my whole sky craves
an island of tenderness.
My rivers tilt towards you.

And I am drawn downwards
as stairs slope into a garden,
or some willow’s bough falls
straight down, away from the milestone.

Stars are pulled to the earth
and laurels on graves won
with suffering, attract banners.
An owl longs for a hollow.

And I lean down
towards you with muscle and wing,
as if to a grave stone,
(I put the years to sleep)

my lips seek yours…like spring.

-Marina Tsvetaeva

Tonight’s agenda: a soak in a hot bath (to ease my aching bones), a mug of hot cocoa (to war my icy fingers), and a blanket fort in which to read a book of poetry (to ease my aching soul).

There was a gap in things; and all the lilacs bloomed.
Words split in our grasp. We were licking the cream
from the universal ice. Words foundered and cracked.
How the bonnet was warm on your bottom! And the metal
continued tick-ticking though the engine was off.

And the evening shuddered, since everything is connected.
I was licking the cream from the universal saucer.
I was all of Cheshire and points between.
You saw the great sky turn blacker, you saw the spray of stars
and your hair got tangled in the windscreen wiper.

At the hot ponds we stripped as night closed in.
I secretly admired your underwear, your long
elusive legs. In the spring where we lay side by side
we held hands. Up above the steam the sky. I said
That one is called Sirius or Dog Star, but only here on Earth.

And when since the stories foretold it we parted,
those birds were all released again. Such buoyancy.
They go on forever like that. How else to say thank you
in a foreign place? We are ever in the arms of our exile,
forever going one way and the other

though sometimes of course on a sphere that is not so bad.
I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day,
on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales,
where the snows come from, where the waters begin.

In the yellow time of pollen when the fields were ablaze
we were very near bewildered by beauty.
The sky was a god-bee that hummed. All the air boomed
with that thunder. It was both for the prick
and the nectar we drank that we gave ourselves over.

-Luke Davies