Tag: LoveRelationships

The Last One

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Bruce Weigl

Featured Art: Two Plant Specimens by William Henry Fox Talbot

The anonymous brown song bird
        is annoying in her insistence
             on repeating the same three syllables
in exactly the same way, endlessly.

        She must know something
             about inevitability,
                       to sing so long,
        no one else in sight.

        The persistence of nature;
         the blind and infinite dedication to a thing
                       in the face of emptiness and silence
        that won’t let you believe that you are the last.

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Watchman, Tell Us

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Chitwood

Featured Image: Mountain Brook by Albert Bierstadt

The thief was none other than the wind.

The thief was the color of nickels.

The thief hummed in the downspouts, around corners.

I’ve already told you.

You should know better.

Mister Know-it-all. Mister Hands-in-your-pockets. Mister Sleep-for-the-morning-is-coming.

The thief had the cinnamon of fallen leaves on his breath.

The thief put a tear in our eyes.

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Heroine in Repose

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rick Bursky
Featured Image: The Vase of Tulips by Paul Cézanne

I wasn’t sure if she kissed me
or simply used her lips
to push my face away. Yes,
the moist warmth was enjoyable,
but when my head was forced
back over the top of the sofa
the intention grayed.

Earlier that day I planned
to quit my job and pursue
a career writing romantic novels
that would be confused with memoirs.
But if I couldn’t distinguish
between a kiss and a push
what chance do I have
of writing romantic novels
that would be confused with memoirs?

After the kiss, and I prefer
to think it was a kiss,
she sank back into the pillows
and watched me
out of the corner of her eye.

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The Night I Proposed

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Peter Stokes
Featured Image: The Kiss IV by Edvard Munch

This is a whole new world to us, and
We drove up to some rooftop parking garage
To look out on the Western night
There up above the Terminal Bar & Grill
And later moving on down darkened East Colfax
Past all the whores with their narrow old asses
And bars wide open with their doors bent back
I thought I saw Bo Diddley
At the wheel of a cream-colored Cadillac
Like out of some wet dream from my Visions of Kerouac
And I knew that at last we had arrived.

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Haircut Talk

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Peter Stokes
Featured Image: Baby (Cradle) by Gustav Klimt

Lenny’s elbows jut from the sleeves
Of his blue barber’s shirt
And carve the air about my head
In a series of unreadable signs
That I trace in the glass of his square barber’s mirror
Where I watch myself watching his face give expression
To the subtlest whir from his scissors and comb.
Or we talk for a moment
About a change in the weather
And I realize for the first time
That Lenny is gay.
“So how’s married life?”
He says through the silence,
The strange edge in his voice
Like a barb on a wire
In the point-blank talk of our new acquaintance,
And I smile a smile that communicates nothing
And it’s suddenly clear that Lenny is drunk.
How much, then, I wonder, does he want to know
About my wife in the hall
With the bread knife in her hand,
Or the one about me,
It was midnight at Tim’s place,
Falling down drunk from the top of the stairs,
Or the sub-zero talk in the car outside Lena’s
And making her cry until 3:00 a.m.
And I talk to myself,
Three speeches in the silence,
And all of this world,
On the still point of a pin,
Spins through the minutes
With nobody talking
As we confess to ourselves
Everything we conceal
And the hair from my head just falls to the floor.

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The Bad Wife

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elizabeth Powell

The door’s made of gingerbread that the rats have eaten through.
You finger your record albums like cold, frigid women.
You could be more silent than silence without much of a fight.
I float, a birthday party balloon you let go into the deepening sky.
How I once felt my life against yours, two pieces of burnt toast.
The town had zoned me for you, now I’m a wetlands—
You can’t run your cable under my land anymore.
There’s nothing wrong with you, just as there is nothing wrong with the sky.
At my core, a humming gas heater, rusted, though still useful.
Nothing loves the world as a mortal soul can.
Yet the very word domestication sounds like a zoo for housewives.
Let’s see—what prayer was it we were saying?
Yes (of course), the one that got us here.
Once I loved you madly, like a girl pirate,
Now I use my sword to pick up moldy, low-loft towels from the floor.
Now we wear headsets because we can’t hear our own music.
Once I was your bride, now nothing more than a mermaid nun,
And the sea is so choppy, torrential, wild, biblical with sadness.
Oh, once you smelled of mint, of truth.

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Longing

.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Natania Rosenfeld

Featured Art: by Creative Commons

I’m not sure what it has to do with length, but it makes sense to think of them together. For longing by definition has no end.

The O.E.D. gives as one definition, the cravings of women in pregnancy. Those objects can be had, though some are quite unhealthy. But cravings are concrete, and they come to substitute for longings. Krunch Kones at the Dairy Land instead of scintillating talk, achievement, the limelight. Whiskey instead of love.

Perhaps “longing” suggests the power of the want, not its unattainability. Perhaps I confuse “longing” with “pining,” which is a word containing pain. To pine is to long with pain for something you’ve lost and can’t have back, ever, or for a very long time: home, or a lover. (The pine tree strained at the sky, stripped, attenuated, its trunk graying.) But I think you long for something you’ve never had, that’s always just beyond the horizon. At the end of a long road whose end is invisible.

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The Immortals

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rick Bursky

In the painting of the young couple kissing
on a bench in a museum hallway
I’m the subject of the portrait
hanging on the wall behind them.
I’m wearing the blue velvet jacket
of an eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry officer
standing beside a white horse that’s too large to be accurate.
Though I’m rendered with lifelike precision. Obviously,
I couldn’t have served in the eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry.
I don’t speak German, and was born centuries late.
I’m not the first person to pay
a famous artist to be in a painting.
Though I wanted to be the man being kissed.
Unfortunately, my famous artist didn’t believe
a girl that lovely would kiss me in public.
I offered photographs of previous lovers
but unless one was kissing me on a bench
in a museum hallway his answer was no.
That’s unfair. Otherwise I’m pleased
with the painting. The couple kissing,
I suspect, also paid to be in the painting.
Though I’m certain they were strangers.
Her eyes are open, peering at where
we might stand admiring the painting.
Instead of resting on his cheek, the palm of her hand
is pushing, proving that while she desired
to live forever in art, her desire didn’t include him.
I once fell thirty-seven feet
from a railroad bridge into a river.
Riding the ambulance to the hospital
is when I decided to pay a famous artist
to put me in a painting.
What brought the woman to the painting
is something I’ve often fantasized about.
The oxygen mask’s elastic strap
pinched the back of my neck.
I kept the discomfort to myself.

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