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Valentine’s Day is as good excuse as any to read ten sexy/swoony/lovely poems by ten sexy/swoony/lovely queer poets, right? Of course it is! Poems are really great at talking about feelings, especially if you find feelings-talk hard but still have some deep, wiggly ones about someone in your life like your best gal pal or your cat or your cutie pie of a co-worker. You can also read them outloud to yourself before bed, which does not feel nearly as weird as it sounds, promise.
Read on, lovers!
1. “Ardent” by Jill McDonough
“I want to give you green and golden fields, alfalfa, wheat / in sunlight, August, three p.m.”
2. “Tree Heart/True Heart” by Kay Ryan
“The hearts of trees / are serially displaced / pressed annually / outward to a ring.”
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
3. “Love Poem to a Butch Woman” by Deborah A. Miranda
“I want to re-fashion / the matrix of creation, make a human being / from the human love that passes between / our bodies.”
4. “The Aureole” by Nikky Finney
“My lips are red snails / in a primal search for every constellation / hiding in the sky of your body.”
5. “[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]” by Marilyn Hacker
“Before a face suddenly numinous, / her eyes watered, knees melted.”
Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
6. “Want” by Joan Larkin
“I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.”
My Body: New and Selected Poems
7. “Recreation” by Audre Lorde
“my body / writes into your flesh / the poem / you make of me.”
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
8. “In Excelsis” by Amy Lowell
“The movement of your hands is the long, golden running of light from a rising sun; / It is the hopping of birds upon a garden-path.”
The Selected Poems of Amy Lowell
9. “Fear, A Love Poem” by CherrÃe L. Moraga
“and I am left, standing / with your face / in my hands / like a mirror.”
10. “bodymap” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
“if a map names where bodies begin and end & who will own their treasures”
