Elsa Gidlow: Constancy
My sister, I keep faith with love, not lovers.
Dawn Potter: The Unicorn Is in Captivity and No Longer Dead
Which do I like better, someone asks, fork or spoon?
And I reply, That’s not a question for Thursday.
Ask me instead how I lost my virginity,
Elsa Gidlow: A Happy Song
Heaped sweets and a treasure
For a new sin to play with,
To pass a night and day with––
Heaped sweets for a pleasure.
Neil Shepard: Mating Behaviors of Storks, Egrets, Humans
We’re out of love again and wandering
with other birdwatchers over the cedar shakes,
spying on spring nesting sites where great
migrations end and settle into familiar patterns
of rearing and weaning.
Abayomi Animashaun: History Lesson
On the wall is a map of places, the so-called explorers
— Mungo Park and the rest of them —
Discovered. But did they know
Of my longing to kiss you tonight?
Mary Jane White: Lindeman
you led me alone
into the sandhills, told me how you were named
for the lindens that grow like smaller oaks
or elms in Europe’s parks
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Ebb
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died
Ruth L. Schwartz: Love Letters from the Late Edge
two women, neither of us young, one of us frankly old,
walking our joy like a large animal
around a city lake
Bill Knott: Sonnet
The way the world is not
astonished at you
it doesn’t blink a leaf
when we step from the house
Mary Jane White: Friend, You Count Yourself Faithless,
…the Sea and all her ships
are women you are too certain of —
who would not marry you for love.
Carolyne Wright: Two Poems from ‘Masquerade’
These coastal nights in candle-flickering dark
I ride you easy, bare-backed and bare-breasted,
your sex straight up inside me like a second
spine.
Mary Jane White: “For You” by Marina Tsvetaeva
For you, I dissolve a handful of
Burnt hair in the glass.
So you will not eat, not sing,
Not drink, not sleep.
Meleager: A Garland of Love Poems
Ah, little archer, so you thought
to hide from me there
in Zenophila’s eyes!
Edna St. Vincent Millay: When you, that at this moment are to me
When you, that at this moment are to me
Dearer than words on paper, shall depart,
And be no more the warder of my heart…
Vox Populi 