Queer Poetry

loving you is like taking codeine in the winter harsh moonlight on the solstice gleaming through my bedroom window an empty bed and the two of us barefoot in the frost on the lawn of your childhood home my blue lips pressed to your jugular victims of double exposure we were either accident or art form but never enviable lonely silhouettes on a frozen ocean jumping at every gunshot crack in the ice playing heart surgeons with frostbitten fingers and losing limbs this is a love that begins in the time of everything crashing to a halt so turn your eyes to the sky darling, it looks like a blizzard

CONSUMPTION // s. mardon

she’s there, in red the same colour as her flushed, shaking fingers and the roses dying on my windowsill I try to capture the halting in my heartbeat the ache within my ribs and the venom seeping into my veins time and time again but there’s something unfathomable about a girl that raw and not enough of a poet in me (and a distance, a heavy distance, confessions lost in translation, and a hand around her waist today).

Sink your teeth into my holy flesh, wherein lies the body and blood of Christ. Devour me; consumption of the willing. Throat offered – soft, tender, dripping with redemption. Fuck me holy, while we sing songs of desecration with hellfire on our tongues. (Crawl through the valley of the shadow of sweet, agonizing death.) We, martyrs of the godless, consecrated by the slack-jawed reverence of carnal confessions, are blessed by breathless litanies of sin.

picture this: it’s me, etching verse into your back with your fountain pen // I wish I sat next to you when we sang hymns as pre-teens // my blood stiffens and creaks every time you paint red on your lips // there’s blossom under your fingernails and dark tree sap under mine. // picture this: our bones these days are made with stained glass // we’re works of art but ready to shatter and crack // when you asked the unholy of me I thought at last, at last, at last.

I thought love would be sweaty palms.  Smothered pillows.  Tearstained napkins and electric touch.  I thought you could only find love at the end of a VHS tape, when the heroine falls into the hero’s arms again and again, sleepless in Seattle, what a pretty woman… I thought love was crying about boys with my head in your lap as your braided my hair.  We counted the minutes between text messages and blocked phone number after phone number, love—was looking good in party pictures. But what you and I have—it’s something different.  You’re a best friend, no, a sister, no, you’re me; we’ve become so twisted in each other’s words that we can’t untangle our tongues.  I find myself in the fuzz clinging to your sweaters.  You taste my morning on the rim of a coffee cup. I kissed a girl once.  You’ve never dated a man.  Together we make two-thirds of a perfect person and settle into the flaws. This isn’t love, I say to the mirror.  It’s friendship.  Sisterhood.  Sameness.  Oneness.  Love looks like the basketball player who was expelled from the team but still won’t text me back.  Love is the girlfriend who chokes you with kisses as you cringe and refuse to meet my eye.  Love is dates going dutch.  Love is wearing his t-shirt on the subway.  Love is meeting her parents.  Love is buying a ring. Love is not the way the air changes colors when you and I look at each other—really look at each other—and can’t look away.  You box the food.  I call the taxi.  How do I look?  Amazing.  Will you zip me up?  She’s such a lucky girl.  Are you ready to go?  The cab’s waiting.   Tonight we’re heading out, as always, to pay our lunch money to the club bouncer and manipulate blue-eyed men into buying blue-eyed martinis.  We’ll measure our worth by our empty glasses.  We’ll wipe vodka stickiness onto each other’s bare knees and laugh, and let our fingers linger, and forget to laugh, and you’ll touch my cheek, and I’ll taste your bottom lip, or— Or I’ll go home with a man.  Which man?  That one.  You wink.  Have fun, tiger.  You’re such a mess.  He’s a lucky guy.  I guess so, I say, I guess so, with his hand strangling my thigh. At his apartment, I hug my knees as he slips like a shadow into the kitchen.  You text me: are you okay?  He returns with a glass of water: how are you feeling? I unfold my legs and turn off my phone.  I’m okay, I say.  I love you.

or: bible child

I wake up praying to be a boy/I wake up praying to be a . boy/I wake up pray- ing to be a boy/I wake up/I wake up/I

am I really numb, or am I just suppressing a strange and quiet love?

here’s the thing about shooting stars: they’re really just hunks of rock burning as they fall,  and all this longing just feels like a sharp ache in your heart and shoulders,  feels like ichaerous falling without  even touching the sun, feels like your cold, dry hands and the thought that, like the matchstick girl, you would burn and burn and burn just to be warm for a moment, and everything feels the way ash tastes anyways, so what does it matter whether you're  trying to find warmth in flame or flesh when it blisters and chars the same either way

I want you to remember how old this world is. I want you to think of all the times you could have been born. In the caves. Moss and dirt and spears. Amidst the gods and the demigods. The time of planets rotating around the earth. During the building of the pyramids. Hidden passages and large sphinxes. A hundred other decades / a thousand other years / a million other moments. But despite everything, we  were born at the same time. We exist now, together – in the same place, breathing the same air. This is a formal thank you to the universe for allowing your birth to be the biggest miracle of my life. For letting you and I walk this earth at the same time.

As a wind in the mountains assaults an oak, Love shook my breast. -Sappho

Today I wanted to kiss her. And today I stopped wanting to. And in between, I saw a city wake up, walked under a pitch black sky, on a square being lit to life. My head was hazy and my eyes were heavy. My feet glided home, though I didn’t really want to leave. Still, I left something behind, almost forgotten. Maybe when I see her again, I’ll want to kiss her. But I hope not, because she won’t want to kiss me back.

She came with alluring smiles, with sharp teeth under blue lips. She told me she couldn’t be killed, she had tried too many times. With raw moans and wheezing, she grieved my absence too much. Her compulsion and itch, her stinging gaze still burned into me. With flowers tucked in the waistline of her dress, Eyes shining like stars reflected on the backs of whales, I should have known there was something else behind them. She dug the spike heel of her shoe into my stomach- Then into my chest- Then my eyes.

The Reason Why Storms and People Share The Same Names