Up on a hill across the blue lake, that's where I had my first heartbreak

In the Beginning // Chad deNiord We lived in bed, no matter where we went or what we did; we were always there, pulling the sheets up over our heads like souls for whom bodies are gowns that weigh too much, pressing ourselves so close to each other we felt our skin cross over to bone. How many days did we dream like this in our high stone room to which we'd flown on the wings of little deaths? We slept awake and woke asleep in a fire we couldn’t put out; in a fire that burned from the inside out. What did we know without saying? That we would suffer the weight we lost without even trying when we returned, then walk like turtles on the beach? How fast do you think we said "Yes! Yes!" to the poor first god when he asked us twice in separate rooms, "Are you sure about this?" So fast, I can tell you, that the birds outside our broken window thought we were singing a song only they remembered.

Fuck a fake friend, where you real friends at

The First Straw I used to think love was two people sucking on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger, but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape, traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth. I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers from a phone line, and you promised to always smell the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts. I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothing and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord around my ankle and yanked me across the continent. And now there are three thousand miles between the u and the s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing at a cement-filled well with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much I’d jump off the roof of your office building just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see what the others see. But you’re here, I’m there, and we have only words, a nightly phone call — one chance to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver, hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire. And lately — with this whole war thing — the language machine supporting it — I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’re injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants, naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes: Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers, so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo, and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint, washing his brushes in venom, and I think of Jenin in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes, like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth, like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reason with the hand. And I don’t know how to speak love when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste, and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself with the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin, and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach her how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers, and to never neglect the first straw, because no one ever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last straw that gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late. - Jeffrey McDaniel

i dont care, i love it

I know that’s what people say — you’ll get over it. I’d say it, too. But I know it’s not true. Oh, you’ll be happy again, never fear. But you won’t forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

you got all the love honey baby I can stand

forgetting something by Nick Flynn Try this—close / your eyes. No, wait, when—if—we see each other / again the first thing we should do is close our eyes—no, / first we should tie our hands to something / solid—bedpost, doorknob— otherwise they (wild birds) / might startle us / awake. Are we forgetting something? What about that / warehouse, the one beside the airport, that room / of black boxes, a man in each box? I hear / if you bring this one into the light he will not stop / crying, if you show this one a photo of his son / his eyes go dead. Turn up / the heat, turn up the song. First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22250#sthash.XAW447Jk.dpuf

But it sure would be prettier with you

Brenda Shaughnessy, One Love Story, Eight Takes

       1
One version of the story is I wish you back—
that I used each evening evening out
what all day spent wrinkling.
I bought a dress that was so extravagantly feminine
you could see my ovaries through it.
This is how I thought I would seduce you.
This is how frantic I hollowed out.

                    2
Another way of telling it
is to hire some kind of gnarled
and symbolic troll to make
a tape recording.
Of plastic beads coming unglued
from a child’s jewelry box.
This might be an important sound,
like serotonin or mighty mitochondria,
so your body hears about
how you stole the ring made
from a glittery opiate
and the locket that held candy.

                    3
It’s only fair that I present yet another side,
as insidious as it is,
because two sides hold up nothing but each other.
A tentacled skepticism,
a suspended contempt,
such fancies and toxins form a third wall.
A mean way to end
and I never dreamed we meant it.

                    4
Another way of putting it is like
slathering jam on a scrape.
Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick?
Which is the worst! So much technology
and no fix for sticky if you can’t taste it.
I mean there’s no relief unless.
So I’m coming, all this excitement,
to your house. To a place where there’s no room for play.
It is possible you’ll lock me out and I’ll finally
focus on making mudcakes look solid in the rain.
                    5
In some cultures the story told is slightly different—
in that it is set in an aquarium and the audience participates
as various fish. The twist comes when it is revealed
that the most personally attractive fish have eyes
only on one side and repel each other like magnets.
The starfish is the size of an eraser and does as much damage.
Starfish, the eponymous and still unlikely hero, has
those five pink moving suckerpads
that allow endless permutations so no solid memory,
no recent history, nothing better, left unsaid.

                    6
The story exists even when there are no witnesses,
kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete,
and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy
factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fast
or everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident.
This little tale tries so hard to be humorous,
wants so badly to win affection and to lodge.
Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved.
                    7
Three million Richards can’t be wrong.
So when they levy a critique of an undertaking which,
in their view, overtakes, I take it seriously.
They think one may start a tale off whiny
and wretched in a regular voice.
But when one strikes out whimsically,
as if meta-is-better, as if it isn’t you,
as if this story is happening to nobody
it is only who you are fooling that’s nobody.
The Richards believe you cannot
privately jettison into the sky, just for fun.
You must stack stories from the foundation up.
From the sad heart and the feet tired of supporting it.
Language is architecture, after all, not an air capsule,
not a hang glide. This is real life.
So don’t invite anyone to a house that hasn’t been built.
Because no one unbuilds meticulously
and meticulously is what allows hearing.
Three million Richards make one point.
I hear it in order to make others. Mistake.

                    8
As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.
I was wrong to tell you how muti-true everything is,
when it would be truer to say nothing.
I’ve invented so much and prevented more.
But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,
in absolute quiet. In extreme context.
To see you again, isn’t love revision?
It could have gone so many ways.
This just one of the ways it went.
Tell me another.

I want this forever, I swear I can spend whatever on it

Before you fuck up and call her anything less than her name, before you grab her by the arm you need to know the trigger that you are pulling at. You need to know that the safety is never on. You need to know her history before you tell me that this isn’t my business. You need to know that her history is my history. See, she and I, we come from the tribe of raw knuckled little girls who call our father by their first names and wear their mothers like bruise coloured war paint under eye. We grew thick skin before we grew permanent teeth. We learned to piece together our own families in the backyards of rented duplexes where we promised plastic faced babies better things in soothing tones that we mimicked from TV. We do not have daddy issues even though our daddy’s have issues. We have piercing eyes and promises to keep. We grew up to be nomads surveying domestic war zones with black eyeliner binoculars, always refusing to camouflage. We threw our heads back and laughed at oncoming explosions, never flinched, absorbing shrapnel, never let them see us cry.
We do not dream of boys who will save us from towers. We dream of boys with courage caked under their fingernails. Boys with hands rough enough to wipe metal tears from our faces but warm enough to mold them into stars. Boys with vertebrae strong enough to lock with ours so they can sleep sitting back to back with us and keep watch. And these are the boys, these are the boys who will find love under our armor. These are the boys who will find that we love selectively but we love fiercely. These are the boys who will learn that we love in ways that leave claw marks down the baseboard before we ever let go.
So do not think she doesn’t know how you fear her absence - you should. Your cage is not stronger than her will or her smile. Do not think you are good enough to tame her. You aren’t. And do not think you are the first to try because i have already closed your eyes and crossed your arms before your body hit the floor. And you think she deserves better than you. You are right. So be better than you.
Be thankful that she knows your name and be careful never to forget hers.

— Rachel Wiley

Come over to the window my little darling, I'd like to try to read your palm

—And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday—
When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
Looking off down the long street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come—
When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies—
I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other—
When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well.

-Gwendolyn Brooks, when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story