To be loved by a woman

It is a remarkable thing
To be loved by a woman.
Women carry the strongest love.
Their hearts are made of ocean currents and lava
Constantly giving forth, drawing out, pressing down.
To be loved by a woman is to define the word “home”.
When a woman loves you,
She is a mother.
A grandmother.
A girlfriend.
A friend.
A quiet voice at the back of the room with ferocity thumping on her breastbone.

Women don’t love with their hearts or their souls or something else poetic and obvious as such things.
Women love with the weight of their ancestors.
They love with the burning flame at the earth’s core.
Women love with the uncertainty of their future
and the fear of death
and the promise of despair.

To be loved by a woman is to know what it feels like to be suffocated in love.
You know what it means to misunderstand her and to furrow your brow as you watch her
Loving you, who you once thought so unlovable.

You are not unlovable.
To exist before a woman is to have an opportunity to be loved deeply
And to be loved deeply, if only for a moment,
Is enough to charge a lifetime.

To be loved by a woman is to know what it feels like to be an all powerful shrike,
for you will eventually pierce her in her chest.
You cannot prevent it, though you will try.
She will love you more for trying.

She will tell you she loves you in a hundred voices.

“Did you make it home safe or not?”
“Why didn’t you text me back?”
“Do you need money?”
“You’re mama’s baby, you know that.”

She means it.

To be loved by a woman is to be loved truly.
Women love you more than they love air or water or their own beating heart.
They will give you their breath and their breast.
Their ribs and their skin.
Their eyes, their wisdom, and their blood.

You will feed from her before you turn from her
And in your darkest attitudes you will reach through the shadows
Searching for her embrace.

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Love of my Life lives on a ferry boat

I have fallen in love with a magical man.

He lives on a ferry boat, sailing it back and forth across the harbor.

When the gate rises at sunset, my heart follows

And I frolic to the dock, waiting to see his lantern light.

The ocean is a remarkable woman

She pushed and she pulled constantly since the beginning of time

During the night, the ocean sings to the moon but the moon does not sing back

Instead, she watches with a hollow eye, mesmerized by the crash of water.

I have fallen in love with a magical man.

He calls me his ferry princess and I call myself Lucky

To be a sprite in the palm of his hand

It’s the only thing I’ve ever imagined being

Constellations twinkle in my pupils

The stars were bottled in my chest from long ago but when the Love of my Life is around

These flaming hot clouds of gas bubble to the top of my head.

I have been on fire for a long time

I have fallen in love with a magical man

He sails across my body each dawn

This man may love me back this time

But he will always leave at dusk

And I shall wait the shivering hours until he returns

He is all I’ve ever dreamed of.

You – Part 3

this poem was written at 2:30am after I woke up from a bad dream about this particular “You”. In the dream, they were naming constellations with another woman. So funny the way something so simple like naming constellations could set me off so much that I jolted awake and wrote this piece! Perhaps I’m too sentimental. Anyway, it’s barely edited and I would like to keep it that way. There was something so raw about how I felt when I wrote this that I want to maintain.

She will know you by your name.

By the bounce in your walk, by the touch of your hand.

This woman, the new one, she will know your voice
She will know you by the scent on your neck
She will know you by the brand of coffee in your pantry

She will know your stomach against her back and your hair in her fingers and your voice behind her ear.

But she will not know you, me.

She will not not know you by the way your body curled up beside mine on a 30 degree morning

She will not know you, voice cracking in the backseat of my car, your eyes looking up at me for once, your hand on my chest and your jeans unbuttoned

She will not know you bated breath, your hands on my waist, the hours slipping away from us as it thunders, and the promise of our future eager beneath our skin

She will not know you whispering my name, your eyes closing, something like a cry in your throat, something like a crack in our love.

She will not know you standing across the bed from me, tunnel vision, telling me all the ways you come apart around me, and the ways I fall apart around you

She may know me by name.
She may know me by photo.
I know that you will tell her.

But she will not know that in knowing you, she shall know me in every way that matters
In knowing you, she shall know my heartbeat, my breath
She shall know what makes me fall apart.

She shall know the crack in chest
The bruise on my brain
The joy laced between my teeth

This woman. The new one. I believe I will like her.
She shall be just like me, after all.

Human Woman

Extraordinary.

They will call you polite
They will think you’re simple
They will believe that you’re sweet
They will say you’re nice

But you have never been sweet.

You have the bite of a crocodile and the venom of a viper and the talons of a raptor.
You have chubby cheeks and bright eyes and smooth skin
And stuffed between your teeth are lies or truths or screams or belly laughs.
Your eyelashes reach up and kiss your eyebrows and he leans down and kisses your forehead.
They may say that your laugh is a little loud.
What they mean is that it’s too loud.
They mean that you’re too loud.
They may say that your laugh is too loud but what they really mean is that your joy is disruptive to them.
They find your joy disruptive because they find you disruptive.
They find you disruptive because when you open your mouth you are not what they expect which is to say that you exceed their expectations.
You are loud.
You chew with your mouth open.
You call people out, you talk back, you smack your gum, you sing along, you dare to be ugly and hard and disagreeable.
Your hair is filthy and you have acne and cellulite and you haven’t slept in 3 days.

And he will still kiss your forehead because he cannot help but fall in love with how perfect you are

You are outrageous!
You have always been outrageous. You are an extraordinary woman.

You are a human.

You are made of blood and skin and sweat and fear, but you have never feared your own soul. Your own voice. Your own light. You are extraordinary.

You have never been sweet.

Glass

You have always been more glass bottle than man
Hard and cold on the outside but something good on the inside
Maybe
But don’t you know that the outside matters?
Don’t you know it’s the only part I can hold?

Might

I mourn
Not the life we had together
But the one we could have had.
The one we saw in between coffee at the breakfast table and the museum trip we took once.
That life that was glimmering and shiny and seemed too perfect to be true.
The life that you and I both wanted so desperately.
The life we deserved.
The life that maybe if we had reached out a little further
Pressed the tips of our fingers into that shining, shimmering, fantastic light,
Maybe we could have grabbed it.
Maybe there’s still time
Maybe there’s not.

I mourn the life that I wanted with you.
I mourn the person that I could have been and the person that you could have been.
God,

you could have been great.

I think that if I were to blow this candle out now, the last thing that you laid your hands on in this place,
That I would extinguish the both of us.

But I must put out the flame.
Or it could burn this house down.

The Woman From the Other Side

I miss the one I was before I knew. One time I stepped into the smelly bathroom because it was the only one vacant and as I turned on the light a large black spider ran from the door frame to under the toilet. And I knew. It knew it was in there with me, under the toilet, waiting. But there was no other bathroom and I really had to go, bladder ready to burst. In that moment, I wished I hadn’t seen that spider. I wish when I walked into the bathroom I had kept my gaze up, instead of down, and had never seen it. That way, when I used the bathroom I would have sinply uses the bathroom. But instead I was a twitching, jumpy mess in there, waiting for the spider that I knew was sharing breathing space with me, to come and bite my flesh. Of course it would have been the same if I hadn’t known. The spider still would be there, but my anxiety wouldn’t.
It is the same with him. I miss the one I was before I knew. Before. Before I knew how he slept and how he snored loud. Before I knew that he always cut his fingernails down to the nubs and before I knew that he smelled like cheap shampoo. Before I knew that he only liked to hold hands for about 5 minutes before he claimed his hands were going numb. I long for the one I was before I knew how his skin sizzled against mine. I miss the one I was before I had been seen by him. Before I was seen by him I had never been seen by anyone. Not even myself.
If I could, I would go back now. Not forever, but for just a moment. And I would look at myself. Really look at myself. I would examine every remarkable piece of me. Where my thighs meet my hips. Where my ears meet my head. Where my knees bend and my stomach dips and the birthmark on my shoulder blade. And I would bow to her. My creator. The me who existed first. The woman from before. I deserve to know her.

Blank Spot

I think,
If you could choose
I would be a piece of white paper. Your blank spot.
That way you could draw all over me. Fill me in with every single thing you think I should be filled with. And when you’re done,
You could close the cap and walk away.
And I,
Of course
Would still be filled up. Waiting for a flood to clear the markings.

There’s a vast white emptiness right in the center of my stomach.
Then your hand hovers over it, I almost think the spot is filled.
It is not.

One of Many Poems

This poem is a crime of passion.
This poem is on fire.
This poem is a fresh baked potato with bacon and gouda and green chiles.
This poem is an icy blue margarita that’s more sugar than tequila
This poem is red hot.
This poem is metal fork to mouth, juicy and savory and dripping down your chin, staining your white shirt!
This poem is Indian food in your apartment on a Saturday night.
It’s tikka masala and gluten free naan and mango lassi with a straw.
This poem is edible.

This poem is a crime of passion.
This poem is on fire.
This poem is a well moisturized afro and a bright colored shirt and roller skates.
This poem is a summer night in the backseat of a pickup with the stars glittering down on us.
This poem is red hot.
This poem is corn rows and sweet potato pie and coconut oil skin.
This poem is sitting on your porch with you in a fold up chair as you sip on iced tea, smoking menthols with your cousin who’s not your cousin and is really just your mom’s cousin’s best friend.
This poem is tangible.

This poem is a crime of passion.
This poem is on fire.
This poem is the feeling in the pit of your stomach
The throbbing of your brain against your skull
The pinch of the muscle in your arm
The weight on your organs
The burning in your eyes
This poem is red hot.
This poem is electricity striking across the night sky, casting a white vein between the clouds.
This poem is the thunder and the snow and the crack in the road.
This poem is weather.

This poem is a crime of passion.
This poem is on fire.
This poem is nothing more than a poem.
This poem is words on a page.
This poem is whatever I say it is.
This poem is my mind and now it’s yours.
This poem is red hot.

Halved

I’ve never half loved you.
Everything with you is whole.
Whole self
Whole breath
Whole gaze.
To half love a person would be to give half the heart,
I suppose.
I never had that chance.
Each half of my heart held you together.
It created all of you from nothing.
But I only half loved myself during this time.
I half loved the summer in the same way.
When the red sun
Brightened your eyes
My heart fumbled
And gave itself over to you,
Leaving only a fraction left for me.