I Want by Kim Konopka

I Want

to shove my clothes
to one side of the closet,
give you the bigger half.
Quietly I’ll hide most of my shoes,
so you won’t know I have this many.

I will
rearrange furniture to add more,
find space on my shelves
for your many books,
nail up the placard that says
poets do it, and redo it, and do it again.

I want
to share a laundry basket,
get our clothes mixed up,
wait for the yelling
when my reds run wild
into your whites
turning them a luscious pink,
your favorite color of me.

I will
move my pillow
to the other side of the bed,
lay yours next to mine,
your scent on the fabric
always near me,
even on nights you’re away.

I will
buy a new bureau to hold your
thousand and one black socks,
find a place for all those work boots,
the ones I refer to as big and ugly.

I want
more pots and pans to wash,
piles of them leaning high
from late night meals
cooked naked and drunk,
red wine pouring into
a sauce of simmering
tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil,
kisses bitten between bites,
and platefuls of our late hours,
stacking up into dawn.

I want
to stock cupboards, closets, and
     pantry,
fill the house with us.
I want to gain weight with you
     because our love,
     our love makes me fat.

Spices by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

coloring

If your man doesn't know cumin
from cardamom, it's time to let him go.
But if he discovers a wetted paintbrush dipped
into turmeric makes a soft yellow line
on your back, spells something like You
are my sun-  then keep him and hold on tight.
I like a cupboard packed with jam jars rubbed clean,
full of the sand from the fantasy beaches of me
and my man and a paintbrush I conjured up
just last night- a cupboard where the difference in reds
means danger or victory for my pot of stew.


fragrance

And what about cloves pierced
into a fat orange, strung up with ribbon
at Christmas? Who came up with that,
and what kind of twisted need did they have
for the occasional prick of spikes under
nails? Once when we were leaving
Bombay Palace, my father spooned
caraway and licorice bits into my palm
from the jade bowl no the counter and said,
"This will clean your breath." The owner
twitched his mustache, and nodded.

heat

Pepper is the obvious choice, in its powder form,
I mean- but there's something about the crush
of peppercorns into a salad, over pasta, the twist
and flex of wrist that sends men back for more.
But if you really want to impress, try chili flaked fresh
under a rolling pin and wax paper. Make sure he sees
you doing this labor of love- act as if you do this
at every meal, that this is how it would be every day
if he desired. And after dinner, float some
in his tea, slip some into his slice of cake.
Be careful for the warmth of his mouth.

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

a little poetry for your weekend

by one of my favorites, sara teasdale:

I Am Not Yours

I am not yours, not lost in you,

Not lost, altho' I long to be

Lost as a candle lit at noon,

Lost as a snow-flake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still

A spirit beautiful and bright,

Yet I am I, who long to be

Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out

My senses, leave me deaf and blind,

Swept by the tempest of your love,

A taper in a rushing wind.

Ponce de Leon

by George Lober

Now that I am fifty
I look at you differently,

I let the scent of your skin
wash over me at night,

I bathe my face in the red
spray of your hair,

and cling to your back
in the dark like a man

both afraid of the jungle
and certain as Ponce de Leon

that my last and only hope
of remaining young

is to discover you
again and again and again.

The Personal

by C. Dale Young


Wear the wedding ring on a chain around your neck.
The personal, as in personal life? Say nothing.
This is how I spoke to myself then. These are the things


I used to remind myself daily. Gender neutral.
Only use gender neutral when you must talk
about your beloved. And never speak of love.


It will only invite questions. So much to learn.
Memorize all of it. Know it well enough to recite
it backwards if you must. Every last detail.


The expected heart rate of a newborn? The exact
percentage of fats, protein, and carbohydrates
in Total Parenteral Nutrition? The formulae


for calculating blood volume? Everything.
You have no time for the personal.
And that morning, on my last day in the NICU?


Do I remember it? I do. I still remember it.
And this is what I say to myself now: You must
remember it. Along with the calculations, the hours


and hours of sick babies, you must remember it.
That woman, your teacher, grilled you for 35 minutes,
question after question after question. She did it


in plain sight, in front of all the nurses, the residents,
the interns, the clerks, the other students. She wanted
you to answer incorrectly, wanted to shame you.


Question after question after question, you hid
behind correct facts and information. And when
she tired of the game, of trying to trip you up,


she announced for everyone that you were the best
minority student she had ever had. And you took it.
You wanted to be like a duck, to let it all wash off of you.


But even in that praise, there was venom. Even in praise,
she found a way to shame you, single you out. And you hid
behind correct answers. But now, you must make it personal.

Flash Cards by Rita Dove

In math I was the whiz kid, keeper
of oranges and apples. What you don’t understand,
master, my father said; the faster
I answered, the faster they came.

I could see one bud on the teacher’s geranium,
one clear bee sputtering at the wet pane.
The tulip tree always dragged after heavy rain
so I tucked my head as my boots slapped home.

My father put up his feet after work
and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln.
After supper we drilled and I climbed the dark

before sleep, before a thin voice hissed
numbers as I spun on a wheel. I had to guess.
Ten, I kept saying, I’m only ten.

Appeal to the Grammarians

by Paul Violi

We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we're capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we're ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn't bounce back,
The flat tire at journey's outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it—here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, "See, that's why
I don't like to eat outside."

Red Door

by Donald Platt

Don Platt was one of my professors at Purdue. He was a great professor and writes beautiful poetry. This was recently featured on Poetry Daily. The formatting might get a bit screwed up but you can see it here as well.


How handsome my father
still is in that wallet-sized photo my 88-year-old mother
keeps by

the telephone! His thick black hair is parted on the left
and combed diagonally
to the right, so that it catches the light from the studio's

umbrella lamps
and glistens. He smiles wide. His cheeks rise. His large black eyes
gaze out

with a look meant only for my mother. He is dressed to kill
in his khaki
army shirt with a neatly knotted black tie and a small

gold cross
pinned to his collar, which means he's a chaplain in the Seabees
about to be sent

to Saipan and Okinawa, 1944. This is the man my mother first
met on the morning bus
to Santa Monica. She was answering an ad for a "room to let"

in a boarding house.
He had a day of leave and wanted to take a swim in the Pacific, stretch out
on his towel and watch

the pale-legged girls stroll by the mumbling surf. The two glanced shyly
at each other.
When they both boarded the evening bus back to L.A., they started talking.

Three weeks later they got married,
had a champagne breakfast with friends at her boarding house. Next morning
he shipped out. Sixty years

hurl by like bumper-to-bumper cars at 70 mph on the L.A. freeway.
My mother visits
my father on North Three, the nursing home's locked unit, every day.

Though he's forgotten
everyone else, he still remembers her. She kisses him full on his purple-blue lips,
which look as if

he's been drinking grape Kool-Aid on the sly.
It's his poor
circulation. When they kiss, his watery, hooded

lizard eyes
wake and glint for a moment like those of the young man in the photograph.
"Do you remember,"

she asks, "how we went all over England, France, and Italy on our
motorcycle?
Coventry, Carcassonne, Vézalay, Rome?" Those names brim

in her mouth, turn
to honeycomb. He shakes his head no. "We would go where the cars
couldn't. When the steep

cobblestone streets became stairs, we rode up the smooth gutters
on the sides.
Don't you remember?" He grins lopsidedly as if to apologize

for his stroke.
"It took you four years to finish your doctoral thesis on the first one hundred
years of the Church of England,

two volumes, one thousand sixty-four pages, with nineteen appendices!
You wrote about Jewel, Hooker,
Andrews, and Laud. Your tutor was Norman Sykes. He must be

dead now. But aren't
they all? That's history for you!" The three of us laugh
uncomfortably.

Suddenly my mother points to the watercolor on the wall.
She painted it
fifty-four years ago. It shows a woman with a child

walking by
a bright red door on a narrow English street. "That's where we used
to live. Remember

Number Two, Little St. Mary's Lane? The red door? The park? Our church?"
My father hesitates,
but only for a second, then says, "Of course I do. Who can forget

our red door?"
My mother smiles. I want to say that the past and the future are
a door like fire

we must walk through forward and backwards. Time is a room
we rent
by an ocean that fills our ears with the surf's susurrus and lamentation

morning, noon,
and night. We live and die in it. The lease is day-to-day. The small photograph
my mother keeps

by the telephone, on which my father will never call her again, is no illusion.
He always smiles
back at her. He is about to say something only she

hears. Their years together
are the morning bus, the evening bus. "Though you forget it all," she replies,
"that's what happened!"

I Crave Your Mouth

by Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

We Are Virginia Tech

by Nikki Giovanni

“We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today and we will be sad for quite awhile. WE are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to know when to cry and sad enough to know we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did not deserve it but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, but neither do the invisible children walking the night to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory; neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail, we will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech. "

The Evening Star

by Louise Gluck

Tonight, for the first time in many years,
there appeared to me again
a vision of the earth's splendor:

in the evening sky
the first star seemed
to increase in brilliance
as the earth darkened

until at last it could grow no darker.
And the light, which was the light of death,
seemed to restore to earth

its power to console. There were
no other stars. Only the one
whose name I knew

as in my other life I did her
injury: Venus,
star of the early evening,

to you I dedicate
my vision, since on this blank surface

you have cast enough light
to make my thought
visible again.

A Marriage by Michael Blumenthal

You are holding up a ceiling
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you. Your arms
are tired, terribly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or the ceiling
will soon collapse.

But then,
unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

So you finally get
to take down your arms.
You feel the relief of respite,
the blood flowing back
to your fingers and arms.
And when your partner's arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can go on like this
for many years
without the house falling.

Falling in Love Is Like Owning a Dog

by Taylor Mali

First of all, it's a big responsibility,
especially in a city like New York.
So think long and hard before deciding on love.
On the other hand, love gives you a sense of security:
when you're walking down the street late at night
and you have a leash on love
ain't no one going to mess with you.
Because crooks and muggers think love is unpredictable.
Who knows what love could do in its own defense?

On cold winter nights, love is warm.
It lies between you and lives and breaths
and makes funny noises.
Love wakes you up all hours of the night with its needs.
It needs to be fed so it will grow and stay healthy.

Love doesn't like being left alone for long.
But come home and love is always happy to see you.
It may break a few things accidentally in its passion for life,
but you can never be mad at love for long.

Is love good all the time? No! No!
Love can be bad. Bad, love, bad! Very bad love.

Love makes messes.
Love leaves you little surprises here and there.
Love needs lots of cleaning up after.
Somethimes you just want to get love fixed.
Sometimes you want to roll up a piece of newspaper
and swat love on the nose,
not so much to cause pain,
just to let love know Don't you ever do that again!

Sometimes love just wants to go for a nice long walk.
Because love loves exercise.
It runs you around the block and leaves you panting.
It pulls you in several different directions at once,
or winds around and around you
until you're all wound up and can't move.

But love makes you meet people wherever you go.
People who have nothing in common but love
stop and talk to each other on the street.

Throw things away and love will bring them back,
again, and again, and again.
But most of all, love needs love, lots of it.
And in return, love loves you and never stops.

The Soul by W.S. Merwin

Is anyone there
if so
are you real
either way are you
one or several
if the latter
are you all at once
or do you
take turns not answering

is your answer
the question itself
surviving the asking
without end
whose question is it
how does it begin
where does it come from
how did it ever
find out about you
over the sound
of itself
with nothing but its own
ignorance to go by

I Crave Your Mouth by Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

"To a Stranger" by Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as
of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste,
matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only
nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take
of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake
at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

*Constance Merritt comments:

There is the all-encompassing Whitman, container of multitudes,
wandering, restless, appetitive, sprawling, desperate to be everywhere,
everything, everyone (There was a child went forth every day, / And the
first object he look'd upon, that object he became...) -- is fragmentation
the end of such desire? wholeness? -- , anywhere but here within the
prison of the self (And you O my soul where you stand, / Surrounded,
detached, in measureless oceans of space...) and a quieter, self-
possessed, concentrated Whitman, who speaks with such poignancy and
clarity of loneliness and longing:

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark
green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not...

And yet (solitary in a wide flat space, / Uttering joyous leaves all its
life without a friend a lover near) he does precisely that, the thing he
knows very well that he could not. And yet one feels that I could not,
the dislocating wrench between the soul's deepest necessity and the
accidents that condition a life.

Founded on the bedrock of human estrangement, "To a Stranger" approaches
this universal problem not through imaginative merging, a penchant for
which D. H. Lawrence takes Whitman to task, but rather through a vision
of mutual recognition. The moment of encounter is pregnant, an
unprepossessing acorn opening out into a glorious oak, a moment which not
only extends future promises, but also one that heals the past, the
passing stranger recalling the speaker to a life of joy already lived. A
life before the schism of gender, before and beyond the compensatory
couplings of sex, a life at once redolent of the uncompromising
innocence of childhood and the sensual and spiritual ripenings of age
(fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured). And note how Whitman's syntax
enacts reciprocity at every turn and the delicate balance between
restraint, passive receptiveness, and active willing (I am to see to it
that I do not lose you) struck in those last three lines. In "To a
Stranger" Whitman figures a way of both losing and finding the self.
Finding through mutual recognition: we can only hope to know ourselves
through another's eyes; becoming is always and only in relation. And
losing because in relation one no longer stands apart (surrounded,
detached in measureless oceans of space...), but rather becomes a part
of something entirely new and larger than the self and is thereby healed
of (quoting Randall Jarrell) "that long disease" the self.

CONSTANCE MERRITT, author of *A Protocol for Touch* (University of
North Texas Press, 2000), lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Aubade by A.R. Ammons

They say, lose weight, change your lifestyle:
that's, take the life out of your style and

the style out of your life: give up fats,
give up sweets, chew rabbit greens, raw: and

how about carrots: raw: also, wear your
hipbones out walking: we were designed for

times when breakfast was not always there, and
you had to walk a mile, maybe, for your first

berry or you had to chip off a flint before
you could dig up a root: and there were

times when like going off to a weight reduction
center you had a belly full of nothing: easy

to be skinny digesting bark: but here now at
the breakfast buffet or lavish brunch you're

trapped between resistance and getting your
money's worth and the net gain from that

transaction is about one pound more: hunting
and gathering is a better lifestyle than

resisting: resisting works up your nerves
not your appetite (already substantial in the

wild) and burns up fewer calories than the
activity arising from hunger pangs: all in

all this is a praise for modern life — who
wants to pick the subrealities from his teeth

every minute — but all this is just not what
we were designed for, bad as it was: any way

I go now I feel I'm going against nature, when
I feel so free with the ways and means, the

dynamics, the essentialities honed out clearly
from millions of years: sometimes when I say

"you" in my poems and appear to be addressing
the lord above, I'm personifying the contours

of the onhigh, the ways by which the world
works, however hard to see: for the onhigh

is every time the on low, too, and in the
middle: one lifts up one's voice to the

lineations of singing and sings, in effect,
you, you are the one, the center, it is around

you that the comings and goings gather, you
are the before and after, the around and

through: in all your motions you are ever
still, constant as motion itself: there with

you we abide, abide the changes, abide the
dissolutions and recommencements of our very

selves, abide in your abiding: but, of course
I don't mean "you" as anyone in particular

but I mean the center of motions millions of
years have taught us to seek: now, with

space travel and gene therapy that "you" has
moved out of the woods and rocks and streams

and traveled on out so far in space that it
rounds the whole and is, in a way, nowhere to

be found or congratulated, and so what is out
there dwells in our heads now as a bit of

yearning, maybe vestigial, and it is a yearning
like a painful sweetness, a nearly reachable

presence that nearly feels like love, something
we can put aside as we get up to rustle up a

little breakfast or contemplate a little
weight loss, or gladden the morning by getting

off to work . . . .

a little poetry for your monday

Remembering Him Dying by Katrina Vandenberg

It was like his teaching her to ride a bicycle
in the driveway that fall, him calling out
*I've got you*, which meant he planned to let go
any moment. He made her try again,
again; she crashed the yellow Schwinn
into the elm, cried and called him names.

If she could have looked back and kept her balance
the last time he shoved her out of his hands,
she would have seen him griefstruck, still, shrinking
as she wobbled from his shadow, into the sun-dappled road.

American Smooth by Rita Dove

We were dancing — it must have
been a foxtrot or a waltz,
something romantic but
requiring restraint,
rise and fall, precise
execution as we moved
into the next song without
stopping, two chests heaving
above a seven-league
stride — such perfect agony
one learns to smile through,
ecstatic mimicry
being the *sine qua non*
of American Smooth.
And because I was distracted
by the effort of
keeping my frame
(the leftward lean, head turned
just enough to gaze out
past your ear and always
smiling, smiling),
I didn't notice
how still you'd become until
we had done it
(for two measures?
four?) — achieved flight,
that swift and serene
magnificence,
before the earth
remembered who we were
and brought us down.