Poems from Winter/Spring 2024

Read 5 poems from our Winter/Spring 2024 print issue, which features a folio of Love Poems by Queer Writers from Guest Editor Luther Hughes

From Luther Hughes's Folio of Love Poems by Queer Writers in Poet Lore Volume 118 3/4
Adam D. Weeks

Unbegun Duet

After Richard Siken

He’s afraid of what he loves
and what it means for him.
He meaning you? Yes.
And how would he describe love?
As his favorite shirt, the one
he’s so careful washing,
running his hands along
the stretched neckline,
the distressed hem. Is that all?
Not the half of it. He’d say
it’s the lake that’s only deep
when you jump into it.
That people don’t know
you need it like water.
He’d wax poetic,
use the phases of the moon
and the life cycle of a bird
to break it down, make it
visual. He sounds creative.
No, he just likes to impress
you. Does he think he needs to?
It doesn’t matter. Why not?
He tells himself it doesn’t
matter what people think
but sometimes he takes this
too far. He says he’s dying
to make something, to see
his hands flitting like quick
wings, building his own little blue
roof. He’s thinking of taking up
knitting, wants to make the softest
wool shirt in the loveliest pinks—
fuchsia, magenta, blush. Who is
he making it for? Whoever needs
it. Whoever it fits. Some threads
are loose but it’s so warm
it seems it wants to hold
you. What else would
he make? Little silk birds
with wings that really flap.
Each with its own name
and story. The blue jay
that lost three eggs. The robin
always hard-rockin’. The sunset
-red cardinal always singing
it’s way home. Sounds pretty.
Look, he’s about to show
you. Show me what?
That everything is.

From Luther Hughes's Folio of Love Poems by Queer Writers in Poet Lore Volume 118 3/4
Anja Mei-Ping Kuipers

Litany Following a Disappointing Meeting

I want fresh, sweet strawberries. I want them 
in my crumb laden bed. I want a future lover contorting
while I give her head. When I withdraw my sodden 

hand, I want faint copper red. To spool 
and be unspooled; I want broken egg yolk scooped.
I want a hundred tiny votives lit and flooding 

this room. I want us rubbed dry by dawn.
Forget what I’ve been taught, I want to skip
ahead. Frigid, rank, uptight bitch—I want 

the specters dead. I’ll bite so hard I floral 
a bruise on her breast. What do I know 
now—a voyeur gnashing in the night? I want to

recognize the saliva, seeping inside. When I end, 
I want more, again. Again.

From Poet Lore Volume 118 3/4
Matthew Tuckner

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

To accurately describe the cancerous body,
you resort to Freud: the nature of horror

is when the home becomes unhomelike.
The cowardly liver. The lionizing bedsores.

The people you love invested in
the particulars of a pain they can’t see.

If the cancer could speak, you say
it would say: I am calling from inside the house.

The pain is the pain of creation. The pain
is the making of room for yourself inside yourself.

From Poet Lore Volume 118 3/4
Gina Franco

Reign of Terror

Looking up at the dome, not seeing the dome.
When did it become transparent?
The search lights swing their arms through the night.
Yoked to one another, to earth, at the neck,
what can they shoulder but the point
of return? Which way? Which way home?
Memory, bejeweled and longing, places a chair in the center of its room
and waits.
I remember the stations. The arrests.
What you want to believe you believe.
Hands in the air, an upside-down march through the night.
The ticking was time in my hands, my own smooth round bleak
bomb to diffuse. I cracked it like an egg. True
to itself, it showed me its golden eye.

From Poet Lore Volume 118 3/4
Jhila Hosseini, translated by Tyler Fisher and Haidar Khezri

Bliss

I longed to know you by sight and make you known:
with steel-toed shoes and iron cane,
I left no city, village, street, or alleyway
unsearched,
but none could tell your whereabouts or name.
I traced deserted wastes and distant hills
and never saw you. 
I turned the ocean, with my burning breath,
to steam and turned up nothing in its depths.
Heartache and weariness heartfelt and heart-full pain:
the sorrow of the poor I probed
and scrutinized the wounded body of the maimed.  
All laughed at me:
“Bliss?!
What you are seeking
was a child they beheaded newly born.”