“I Have Grown Weary Of Talking About Life As If It Is Deserved, Or Earned, Or Gifted, Or Wasted. I’m

the next kiss i kiss will leave us feelin richer

I don’t have a guidebook for love. One day it’s a flower I wear on my jacket, on another, it’s a dagger hidden in our bed, on another, it’s a flame that sears. Still, on another, it’s a sugar cube dissolving sweetly on my tongue.

Nizar Qabbani, tr. by Nayef al-Kalali, from Republic of Love: Selected Poems; “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green”

Twilight pendant

Maybe I am just a crazy bitch with good pussy

“If you will grant me one vivid morning, I can chain it to me for fifty years.”

— William Stafford, from Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems, eds. Vincent Wixon and Paul Merchant (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014)

“To forget how you tasted those leggy afternoons when our bodies spilled like wine across the floor, is to admit a hawk into the house. Is to wring a rag of water. When I’m in the thicket with my smaller hungers, I don’t need to know every cave and what it stores, cool and damp, for you. I don’t need to know how many nests are lined with your hair. There’s nothing tame about twilight, this old song shaking the sweetgum leaves— when I thirst I dream like a violin waiting the bow.”

— Amie Whittemore, from “Nocturne,” Birmingham Poetry Review (no. 49, Spring 2022)

I’ll stay in Today by Chukwu Adaeze