“how to write a love poem”

Just today, telling a boy in juvee
how to write a love poem,
I’m stammering over ideas
of detail and unique, trying
to get him not to say happy
or sparkling eyes but to talk
about what is his love’s, only
hers, and no one else’s
like how the first time
I picked up something from
somewhere, a book maybe
a phone, and on the train platform
you smack it straight down
out of my hand and we stare
at each other dead-faced
for a millisecond and then bust
out laughing – like that, I tell
him and he’s cracking up; he’s
dying in this jail, where he doesn’t
know how soon he’ll be out
even though he’s just eighteen
but right now he’s full belly
doubled over and I describe it
to him again and who knows
what this beautiful, tethered young
man has done to forfeit his life
in this place but I remember
again, as he pounds the fused plastic
table how I want sometimes secretly
to hold your head in my hands again
and tell you that a castle of a brownstone
in Brooklyn is yours, that we’ll
be sweet forever, and make
outlandish things from fish and
peppers; and this time I’ll mean
it, except I don’t tell the boy that
part, but he only needs the part
where, when I least expect it,
you’ll slap something out of my
hands and we’ll roll on the floor
laughing and that’s what I want
to remember if you’ll remember
that too, except I worry you don’t
but the boy tells me, still chuckling,
his eyes glassy, that he gets it. I get
it, he says; detail, I get it, yeah
and shows me the part he’s already
written to his girl about how
he’s not mad that a new man
is holding her and how she deserves
that because she is beautiful
and if he was the new dude, he’d
hold her too, and he respects dude
for knowing how deserving she is
and I say yeah, I get it, like that,
you’re on it. You already know
what to do.

Roger Bonair-Agard

To We The People
Lake of creatures and malady
People sometimes flourish
under the sun
The moonlight creatures come out

Micah (Age 9)
4/17/2011

How to Spot Someone in Love with You

They tell you you’re brilliant.
They bother you.
They say, “Do you want some of my cookies?”

They are timid around you. They avoid eye contact.
They stare at you when you aren’t looking.
They pause when you talk to them.
They’re spying on you. They’re hiding from you.
You find out they hide a picture of you under their pillow.

They act like they are MACHO!
They pretend they have a six-pack but really they have a six-roll.
They MAKE SURE they say hi to you EVERY DAY.
They bring flowers that you are allergic to. They stand up for you in front of the teacher.
They carve your name in a tree. They throw rocks at your window.
They bring you cookies with hearts on them.

The suspect will blush when you talk to them. Maybe they will faint when they talk to you.
They pretend to faint so that you have to give them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (CPR)
They pass you notes. They write your name on all of their binders in cursive.

Jumping up and wiggling around me, pleading to be scratched behind the ears.
People hugging, dogs licking, horses nuzzling. Skunks stick their tales up very straight and stiff.

They tease you about something they like about you.
They talk about so-and-so. They pretend to like somebody else.
If they think someone else likes you, they hate them.

They try to make you laugh.
They laugh at your dumb jokes.
Their girlfriends giggle around you.
They sing songs that don’t make sense: “I’m a bee spreading my wings, I’m a bee doing my things...”

They blush.
They stick up for you.
They write you a poem.

P.S. They really do stare at you!

by Sarah’s 3/4/5 class

Late Poem

" . . . a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern."
Nabokov

I wish we were Indians and ate foie gras
and drove a gas-guzzler
and never wore seat belts

I'd have a baby, yours, cette fois,
and I'd smoke Parliaments
and we'd drink our way through the winter

in spring the baby would laugh at the moon
who is her father and her mother who is his pool
and we'd walk backwards and forwards

in lizard-skin cowboy boots
and read Gilgamesh and Tintin aloud
I'd wear only leather or feathers

plucked from endangered birds and silk
from exploited silkworms
we'd read The Economist

it would be before and after the internet
I'd send you letters by carrier pigeons
who would only fly from one window

to another in our drafty, gigantic house
with twenty-three uninsulated windows
and the dog would be always be

off his leash and always
find his way home as we will one day
and we'd feed small children

peanut butter and coffee in their milk
and I'd keep my hand glued under your belt
even while driving and cooking

and no one would have our number
except I would have yours where I've kept it
carved on the sole of my stiletto

which I would always wear when we walked
in the frozen and dusty wood
and we would keep warm by bickering

and falling into bed perpetually and
entirely unsafely as all the best things are
—your skin and my breath on it.

Cynthia Zarin

On The Origins Of Things

Everyone knows that the moon started out
as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar
flare that fled that hellish furnace
and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended
between the planets. But did you know
that anger began as music, played
too often and too loudly by drunken performers
at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles
evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness
from misunderstanding? As for the dominant
thesis regarding the origin of love, I
abstain from comment, nor will I allow
myself to address the idea that dance
began as a kiss, that happiness was
an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient
game of jump-the-fire gave rise
to politics. But I will confess
that I began as an astronomer—a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

Troy Jollimore

The Lists

I have had, at last count, 44 jobs. Besides writing. Because of my ferocity on the subject of writing, I have refused promotion, insisted on strange hours and manners of employ, skirted any false career that didn’t make room for writing. The first time I noticed that my fanaticism was outwardly evident was when I finished grad school; the NJ and Philadelphia colleges where I taught paid so little that I had to work in a coffee shop, too, to make my rent. I had not been at this coffee shop long, making lattes between grading essays, before people were hanging over the counter asking for prompts, pressing their journals across the counter, telling me about the book they would someday write. My writing ferocity has a big aura, it’s true. I bring my art everywhere I go, in everything I do. Taking inventory in basement bookstores, cleaning cat piss out of attics, serving champagne from silver trays, editing books on foot disease, I bring the river of writing with me everywhere.

This is what I know about the writing life: you must be dogged. Also, you must be flexible.

If you are a writer feeling like you’re not a writer because you have no time, because you have no money, because your faith is lapsing, because your good work is largely unrecognized, remember this: the river of writing is always inside of you. It belongs to you. It is ever present. Sometimes it’s murked green and filled with bloated dead. Sometimes it sparkles and slaps with fat leaping fish. Other times, it is only a watery thread in black muck. Regardless of its incarnation, it is always there. It belongs to you and only you. You are responsible for it.


Actually, I think we worry too much about the writing/product/river itself. If you are going to write, if you will not say no, then the river will always be there. What we should really focus on is our paths to the river. Our methods of returning. Will you not venture down if there are brambles or poison ivy or agendas or hidden beasties? Will you try new paths anytime you have to? Will you do it because you love it?

As a writer, you must write to grow your own innards, your own wisdom, your own sense of self in the world. If you do your writing and share it, you will teach us what you have seen and come to understand it better yourself. This is work so imperative and illuminated that the world must not be allowed to turn without our attempts at it.

So, yeah. “Making time for writing.” This is, to some degree, a fallacy. There is very little time. You can’t make time. I work hard at other things to make money for food and shelter and books. But I maintain, stubbornly, that there is always time to write. It’s already there. If the river is inside of you, then you need not take yourself anywhere, sequester, plan, scheme, schedule, extrapolate time for your writing. You must do it, whenever and wherever and however you can. Thinking counts, too. Living counts, too. Reading counts, too. Writing counts, too. This is your work. Do it however you must.

I have two testimonial lists to the opposing but necessary planets of doggedness and flexibility. Some Things I’ve Written Upon and Some Places Where I’ve Written.

Some Things I’ve Written Upon:

Receipt tape from registers
Folded looseleaf in backpockets
Sheaths of flattened cardboard in an inventory room
The blank page in backs of books
The back flaps of books (when desperate)
Tiny notebooks
Spiral notebooks
Expensive notebooks
Cheap notebooks
recycled, yellowed, fresh, lined and unlined notebooks
Old order forms
Cocktail napkins at the bar between shifts
Paper candy bar wrappers
Once, on a dollar bill, which I then burned to make a point
Receipts from the wallet
Paper ads that fall from magazines
Postcards you meant to send
Old music notation paper
Old library dewey decimal cards
Forming words on a leg, with a finger, for memorization
In acronyms, also for memorization: “The little organ is a dream.” “Dream Organ.” “D. O., D. O.”

Some Places Where I’ve Written:

Under the hedge in Chestnut Hill
In the lunchroom
On their broken chair in the garden
Next to a wheelchair with a woman in it
Beside his easel
Sitting on sand
Sitting on rocks
Sitting on curbs
Sitting on counters
Sitting on benches
Knees up, in bed
Next to 400 suitcases in an attic
In the empty bar before intermission
On the truck
In the hallways
On the edge of the stage
On the sides of mountains
In kayaks
Next to the receiving belt
In the lunchroom
In the lunchroom
In the lunchroom
In the cleaning closet, waiting for the mop bucket to fill
In her borrowed basement
In libraries
In someone else’s kitchen
In the hospital waiting rooms
In my grandfather’s abandoned study
On a box in the closet
Upstairs, with that ghost rushing around
On trains
On porches
On planes
Here, now, where I am making notes on your faces

Be dogged and fierce. Be flexible. Own it.

Elizabeth "Frankie" Rollins

Give All to Love

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-frame,
Plans, credit and the Muse,—
Nothing refuse.

’T is a brave master;
Let it have scope:
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope:
High and more high
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent:
But it is a god,
Knows its own path
And the outlets of the sky.

It was never for the mean;
It requireth courage stout.
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending,
It will reward,—
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,—
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, forever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.

Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young,
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free;
Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

Emerson