10 Love Poems by Queer Poets for Your Queer Valentine’s Day
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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 Cherríe 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”
Read A F*cking Book Review: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is Living Her Truths in “Bodymap”
we’ve always come on boats. we’re going to keep coming. we know the waves and rough water. / bless the rough water and the small boats. / bless the worst thing.
Lambda Award winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book of poetry, Bodymap, covers a lot of terrain. All of it is personal, all of it is raw, all of it keeps you turning the pages and makes your heart beat and wither and burst.
It’s a tumultuous journey through otherhood, the fleeting things that change us, and the fights we have with ourselves in the mirror and in our heads. Leah’s a powerful guide, armed to the teeth with confessions, a steadfast sense of humanity, and a killer optimism. Bodymap is the winding tale of a 30-something’s journey in this world, one centered around her experiences as a queer, disabled femme of color from working-class roots and with a legacy in diaspora.
The title poem is about love and how it changes us, how it helps us erase and redirect the past and our emotions and maybe even the things that make us tense or anxious or uncomfortable. Throughout the book, Leah’s searching for salvation — by laying in bed with her vibrator, fucking in bathrooms, driving a beat-up car across the bridge, or clinging tightly to the people who show her themselves and a little bit about herself in the process.
The poems cover a lot of ground, but they never lose the unwavering voice. They never lose the strength, the drive, the relentless pushing and scraping and grasping for more. Leah’s activist spirit and tender queer heart fill the pages, every one. It didn’t hurt that I saw so much of myself in the book, hidden inside the dirty bar bathrooms and in love on someone’s couch. But the way Leah writes let me see her, too, in all of her glory and splendor and low points. Her poems go where other poems so often can’t or won’t, past watching Netflix all night because of fibro and the people who can’t love us like we need to be loved and forgiving ourselves for how we treated our parents and how delicious freedom tastes even when it’s hard to swallow and hard-fought.
It can be easy to obscure yourself in poetry, to hide your own ugly or to write so many lines about how much you loved your kindred spirits and all of their faults until you run out of room to talk about the other stuff you’re carrying across borders. But Leah doesn’t.
This is all of it, all the guts and all the hurt and all the days she lusted to leave her office or to go home or to get out of bed.
I gave myself one week to read Bodymap. It didn’t even take me three days, each one spent waiting until the commute to and from work to tear into it and read and reread the poems on the train until I missed my stop or felt a little less alone in this world. There’s something about the kinds of stories that acknowledge the desolation and the hopelessness but refuse to forget the amazing stuff we do in spite of it, or in the thick of it.
I told myself 2015 was the year of living my truths. I’m excited to have a guide in this book, and in Leah’s soulful mission to love and be loved — the rest of it be damned.
Agustina Woodgate Brings Poetry to a Thrift Store Near You
Carmen’s Team Pick:
There’s just something about a girl who makes art.
Agustina Woodgate is an artist born and trained in Argentina and transplanted in Miami. Her work encompasses a variety of mediums and styles, but focuses on interaction. Woodgate wants people to interact — with each other, and with her art. She wants a communal response. She wants something more than you standing in a museum and gaping at a large painting or one of her exhibitions. Agustina Woodgate wants to interact with you. Are you nervous yet?
Woodgate was recently highlighted on the series O, MIAMI for her latest project: Poetry Tags. The project entails Woodgate sneaking around Miami thrift stores to sew new labels in the clothing inside. But this isn’t just a clothing label. It’s Agustina Woodgate’s Special Poetry Label That Says:
Life is a huge dream
why work so hard?
-Li Po
Her O, MIAMI segment reveals not only her strategy but her accent:
Woodgate’s Poetry Tags project is about memories, and the little pieces of ourselves we store in our clothing. (I remember each moment in my lace-up leather boots so vividly that she need not elaborate on what she means.) Woodgate wanted to highlight that relationship. Woodgate’s art focuses on interaction because she believes interactions are art. Get it?
But this project also focuses specifically on how clothing can be a medium to bring poetry into our lives if we bring the two together. She describes it better in her own words:
Sewing poems in clothes is a way of bringing poetry to everyday life just by displacing it, by removing it from a paper to integrate it and fuse it with our lives. Sometimes little details are stronger when they are separated from where they are expected to be.
Woodgate’s art is strong because it’s not where you expect it to be.
Oh My God I love few things more than poetry, or clothes, or thrift stores, or Agustina Woodgate.
I’m sharing this with you even though the line of poetry Woodgate uses isn’t from an Eileen Myles poem, or even from an anthology she edited, and I don’t live in Miami, and Agustina Woodgate makes tons of art and has tons of projects and this is just one of them.
I’m sharing this with you because being able to touch, and relate to, and be a part of art, is a beautiful experience. I’m sharing this with you because I find it really, really incredible when artists don’t think of their work as something to gawk at and be in awe of, but something to feel connected to and comfortable around.
But mostly, I’m sharing this with you because there really is something about a girl who makes art, and it’s kind of like poetry and the perfect shirt.