Write a poem for Valentine's Day. Here's a poem to inspire you.
"Valentine" by Carol Ann Duffy
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
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Una traducción:
No te regalo una rosa ni un corazón de satén
Te regalo una cebolla
Una luna envuelta en una bolsa de papel de estraza.
Promete luz
como el metódico desvestir del amor.
Toma.
Te cegará con sus lágrimas como un amante.
Hará de tu reflejo una foto del desequilibrio del dolor.
Trato de ser sincera.
Te doy una cebolla.
Su beso feroz quedará en tus labios
de manera posesiva y fiel
como somos nosotros
mientras lo seamos nosotros.
Tómala.
Sus argollas de platino se encojen para formar un anillo de matrimonio,
si así lo prefieres.
Letal.
Su aroma se adhiere a tus dedos,
y a tu navaja.
elf
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This is post-Valentine's Day....but it always takes time to percolate.
Queen of Window Love, Mistress of Mistaken Affections
--Listening to the 80s While Staring Out, Sector Lechuga
Out the window there is no love but the flocked edges of sky writing the names of gnats, like lovers scratched into a tree. It and I leave a brief cursive of anecdotes, catching. Roberta and I search for paradise.
A noisy trace of slaughterhouse creeps the night’s distance, tramples through truck crops, into gawky frangipani, into me and other formerly nubile brush. The scent steps over fences, then into the sleep of fat steers and all their glum mothers.
The window brags, pretends to offer love in a season of hurricanes, but by now I know it’s only bad television. Seconds later, my attention is moved again to the periphery of lonesome: a salamander festoons the louver’s aluminum whispers, with its own nervous breath, wide-eyed, an angel having to catch up to God’s footstep. He and I are both so very Chuck D, fighting miserable with our hands clenched like crooked teeth.
I forget myself. I get lost and braless. I throw back a laugh and land somewhere in the east, in a boy’s rumbling muffler, in the fist of love, cresting.
An island shimmies, worrying the foot of the radio. As Costello sings a song of salvation from whiskey’s Saturday lips, dusty screens (pinholes to the mild and the mystical) whisper soft and hot, while my body minds itself in spite of the breeze.
Jane Alberdeston Coralin
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