Love

alex stoddard

Love is a pack of cigarettes that you smoke all at once and now you are burned and sick. Love is unceremonious. Love is drunk and disorderly. Love is a ghost you can’t exorcize. Love is blind groping in the dark—terror, bliss. Love is acres of pain with a square inch of pleasure. Love is a vice. Love rebels. Love is a teenaged party at your parents’ house and by the end, everything is trashed, and everyone’s in trouble. Love thinks it is above rules. Love is above rules. Love is being gutted, gently. Love is wordless. Love is wordy. Love makes morons. Love is a vampire. Love doesn’t give a fuck about you. Love makes you a liar. Love ties you upside down to a tree and sacrifices you in the name of no one. Love is a starving person who can’t swallow. Love swallows. Love is unconsenting. Love uses force. Love is the friend who sucks all the life out of you and then doesn’t even ask how you are. Love is a dumb jock. Love is a poorly-run marathon where you start out so confident and by mile 9 you are sobbing in the back of an ambulance. Love is alone. Love is a big bang. Love is the single greatest purveyor of entropy. Love is a black hole that sucks out all the light. Love bites. Love is on the tip of my tongue. Love wanders aimlessly. Love wants you to quit your job. Love is your job. Love will fire you without notice. Love costs more than a house in San Francisco. Love is somewhere between heaven and hell, and either way, you’re dead. Love is a high-class whore and you pretend to have the resources. Love is defiant. Love is fear. Love is the roommate who steals your furniture and doesn’t pay the electric bill and leaves you lying on the cold floor. Love is a goddamn lesson. Love asks you to murder, and gives you no alibi. Love is the fool who occasionally spouts deep, unbidden truth. Love is choosing to go on hunger strike at the banquet. Love is a burning coal in your beak. Love is an obsidian blade made of winter. 

Sonnet Number 3

Whereupon this question asked: "Can you write a sonnet about something they sell [at Trader Joe's]," I set myself upon the task:

Proserpine by Rosetti

Fecund-full of aril, she, knowing nothing chaste,
Falling into mouths of thieves and eager reprobates,
Who pay two bits to lay her down, her fertile forme to waste.
Lusty wanton revelers, in longest lines awaite.

She craves the slow blade cleaving her, and leaving her undone, 
Exposing her fair satin, and rubies one-by-one.
You ravage her too soon, my dear; you taste her just for fun,
E’r hastening her perishing, believing you have won.

Her worth you’ll never know for she is silent and unscolding.
Let her not to enter you — impatient, unbeholding.
Her fertile field doth fallow callow jealousy’s unfolding.
Once for only kings and queens, a baroness withholding.

Now a courtesan for commoners, and libertine faire hawkers—
Everyone has tasted her, but still no one can mock her.

Elegy

We raise the dead with wistful ghosting
and make life to thunderous applause.
To pit the heart against the one it's hosting--
no winners here; our bodies break the draw.
Tell me which ache we plan on choosing:
the lion's maw around our throats,
haunting, hunting, but never killing, only bruising,
or the shattered backbone of one wrong note;
we'll never walk upright again.

Every now and then,
our kingdoms beg for the madness of war--
its gifts and its losses, the looting and lore.
Libertine, you pronounce, as though it means liberty,
but you're beholden to winter, the allure of the hoar.
The wind of the North whispers your liturgy
while the frost lays you down in her bed wanting more.
Please forgive me, dear friend, for warming your grave.
You like ice, but I will always be fire's slave.

a woman is alive

W J Neatby

a woman is alive
stars don't shrink but sing in sighs
as sirens by the daylight hide
until night comes
when they will shine

never will she wed another
she's not yours, nor any other's
you can borrow her one time
she shoots to kill or else she smothers
she breathes you in and then you die

a woman is alive
she ties you up, but not to bind
she holds you down and you don't mind
she steals your heart if she's inclined
her feelings change upon a dime

never will she wed another
behold the beauty of your lover
you can borrow her one time
she doesn't care what you discover
about fire, ice, and turning tides

a woman is alive
stars don't shrink but sing in sighs
then fade into the morning time
when sirens, they are not unkind

but still they kill, and leave you blind

Medical Sonnet #2

art by Monica Aissa Martinez

Oblite thee! You're no egg of mine, nor will ever be
beastily cascading down, slime-covered from my Fauverie.
Though you do bestow a fuller forme with ingenuity,
You are no kinge, no son of mine; vacate my ovarie!

Faker, quayside crawler docked in heaving waves: avast!
Spewing hurling ralph-and-earling, leaving me aghast.
Booming thunder pummeling in laparoscopic blasts,
Shrewd marauding therapie / corporeal lambaste.

Hungry doctors do associate your countenance with food.
To an apple or a grapefruit or a pea they do allude.
Perhaps they plate and instagramme you while I am subdued.
It matters naught, in afterthought; I've nothing more to brood.