A man walks into a cafe
and writes a piece of music so beautiful
he forgets everything he knows.
Like the son who he hasn’t spoken to in 6 years,
and the bruise around the waitress’ eye,
and how uncomfortable he feels inside of his body.
And there is no cafe,
and there is no man.
Only the music.
A magic song,
when played he can remember things;
the first time he tasted an orange
and the smell of his mother’s perfume
while she held him as a baby,
and he knows things, too,
things he shouldn’t be able to,
like how his son dreams about wolves almost every night,
and the waitress is still in love despite her husband’s fists,
and that his body is like a shell that the crab wears
and there is only
the music, the music, the music.

by Amanda La Valley

I’m writing a book of love poetry,
a complete volume set about
how you look in the middle of the night
when I wake up to roll over.
Also, I am a werewolf.
I grow claws and fangs and
a need arises in me so poignant I could cry,
like you do when you listen to Tchaikovsky
or speak to your mother on the telephone.
I must resist the urge to bite you in bed,
but you are so soft and wanting,
I am sure there is not a word
for the kind of giving that you are.
Some would call it selfless,
but maybe we’re just lonely.
Maybe we give each other
a space to fill with our emptiness.
I am not so good at eating,
I am too full of your need.
You ask me over cups of weak tea
what its like to be a slave to the moon
but I think of myself
more as a warrior in her service,
I am sworn to love her.

Tell me the story about you as a little girl,
how you drew the most beautiful woman in the world
and named her Morning.
How she never came for you,
even though you could already feel her arms around you.
How you put down the paintbrushes,
the knives, the half smoked cigarettes,
the apples and pears and jagged pieces of glass.
Tell me how you make the crickets sing,
how you rest your elbows on your knees.
Tell me the story of how I was born in the desert,
How you laid on your left side for 6 months while you grew me
and maybe that’s why my heart is always hurting.
Tell me how you learned to hide
behind more masks than eye glasses and bed sheets.
Tell me the story of how you became my mother,
the one who gives everything she has,
and even things she does not have.
How once you thought that admirable,
but now it is a burden you bear upon your back,
a burden you bear upon my back.

I told him
“I want to be on earth alone,”
and he asked,
“Can’t I stay with you?”

I ran my hands up his back
bumping the blades
of his shoulders,
dipping my fingers
between the ribs,
tickling,
lightly.
Feathers.
Moons.

This isn’t a poem,
it’s a war cry.

In front of me there is a door
and everyone knows that the heart pumps blood
but what science didn’t tell them
is why I can’t stop trying to open you,
like the petals of a flower,
and you are so delicate,
like stars plucked from above,
burning my hands,
my lips, my hips, my breasts
I just want to hold you against me.
I’ll take the scars as sacrifice,
quit clawing,
and call it even.

I wanted anything,
everything,
and nothing.
I’m caging
the softness
of my hardened insides,
the pull of claws
on meat and bone.
Red, red.
This isn’t a metaphor,
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

I’ll stitch the stars together
in places they don’t belong.
You have a freckle on your lip
in the exact same place that
I have a freckle on my lip,
and when we kiss,
we move the stars,
like twins.
Gemini,
one and two.
But I am the crab,
in a shell,
pinching happiness
out of things that are sad.

“I looked into the
heart
of the storm,
the cyclone pumping peace
in the middle of
everything,
and do you know
what I saw there?
Flowing from the veins?”
I leaned closer,
his breath blew across my cheeks.
It’s okay to not understand yourself.
“I saw
the throbbing
of human
darkness.”

It smells like flowers
and fire outside
and I have never felt so
alone
as I do standing outside
under the crab apple tree
waiting for the moon to fall
to my feet and beg
to be loved
by me.
I am waiting to burn.

I have all this love in me
and it has nowhere to go.
Nobody will take it.
That is the root of my sadness.
You are the tree
from which it has grown.