love poetry

both lesbian and regular style

this is what love looks like. by the ever lovable izzy bulling.

simone norman and i cohost a horror reading series called HORRID. readers like Tony Tulathimutte, Zefyr Lisowski, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Spike Einbinder read stories to make our audience go “auhhh” and our audience goes, “auhhh.” the next one will be Sunday March 22nd at 7 pm at Topos Too in Ridgewood, Queens, so go ahead and block that out for us please.

for our last reading, simone and i wrote love poetry. love is the most terrifying thing on earth, i guess. it devours everything and can never be defeated.

i’m gay and simone is straight, so i wrote sapphic poetry and she wrote heterosexual poetry. both have a long and venerable tradition. ours is, i believe, the last word on both forms. but judge for yourself.

(content warning: like love itself, these are a little gross!)

My Sapphic Poem

by sophie

I want to kick your head apart like an old pumpkin

I want to throw you at the wall and when you bounce i will spin kick you like Sub Zero and you’ll explode into pomegranate seeds that i’ll gather in a ziplock and stomp.

My hands are scissors but not like that guy’s were.

I’m on my way over to lay eggs in your cunt.

My hands are thirsty blades that can cut a rat in half, so keen with yearning that both halves grow new halves. Two rats.

Taste me and know that I am your wine. I am a jet of wine from a jumped on bag. A jet of hot white wine arcing into the sky and down your open throat like you are a water fountain for hot wine and I am a bird bathing in your gaping mouth where the wine pools and steams, a bird that cooks itself in hot wine, like that french bird beneath the napkin. Crunch my bones and cry “hon hon hon. merci. merci boucoup.” Scream your french words into me.

I smell perfect.

A pumpkin rots from the inside out until you kick it, fierce and direct like charlie brown never could. You are Lucy and I am Peppermint Patty. I am your experiment. You call me Sir and I say that’s not yours to say, that’s the other one, and you say, which other one. I say, the other one, with the glasses, but you are lost now in a dream, trying to remember if Snoopy could talk.

I am on my way home from laying eggs in your cunt. Tomorrow they will hatch in the dawn light and pour from you, fast honey made by tall bees. I will wait between your thighs at your sweet egg delta and gobble like pac man. I will gobble every egg, for my eggs hatch only eggs, eggs that drag themselves with little arms, for yearning hatches only yearning, every opening only opens onto the next and the next, the infinite orchid, incredible value, the arms are not part of the metaphor, strictly functional, the egg is what’s important, egg of yearning, focus on egg. Focus only on egg.

I’m like if Zeus was a girl who was good about consent. Take me by my petrichor hair and throw me down the stairs. Please!

wow, pretty good! now let’s see what the straights are like

Heterosexuality Poem

by simone

Are you dry? He asked me, his brown eyes flashing straightly.

What? I asked, my also brown eyes questioning straightly.

You’re not wet, he countered. He stroked my proportionate sized breast the way someone who likes breasts would.

Yes I am, I said, clasping his wrist. He flinched. Sensitive creature.

I dunno, said he. It’s probably not the time.

I looked into his eyes, still brown, like wood. I said, of course. You’re so right. It’s not the time.

He relaxed and fell back into the gorgeous linen sheets I got him for Christmas the year he got me a gift card to Trader Joe’s .

Did I do something, I whispered, trying to convince myself my pussy was bone dry.

He whispered back, yeah probably.

wow, pretty good! i guess it’s true that love is love is love. thank you, hamilton.