LOVE LISTS
He is because I am.
He isn’t because I desire.
He isn’t because I need.
He isn’t because I deserve.
He is because I am.
I am patient.
I wake up knowing I’m not where I want to be and deliberately choosing to acknowledge what I’ve done to get to here—choosing to be grateful for all I am and the moment I’m in.
He is because I am.
I am generous.
I give. I share. I support. I respond. I can’t stop.
Neither can you.
A festival of giving.
He is because I am.
I am kind.
I honor and give. I understand and support. I practice ruthless compassion with those I encounter.
Now, learned for myself.
He is because I am.
I am empathic.
I feel your heart.
I feel your experience.
I feel your restlessness and uncertainty.
I feel your love.
I feel your pain.
I feel.
I am addicted to feeling.
He is because I am.
I am magical.
I say and it is.
I create because I want to.
I make time stand still, miracles happen and fantasies explode into my daily routine.
Because I see magic.
In everything.
He is.
He is.
He is because I am.
LET IT BURN
Love is limitless.
I figured that out on a Friday
in late August
in the middle of a desert
in Nevada.
When I got it I started to create.
—2nd chakra explosion.
I chose a single fey partner, daily, to play.
in the art
to the music
amongst the mystery and heat and costumes and spirit and soul and effervescent humanity.
I chose a new bike path, at any given moment.
to find more.
to see more.
to meet more.
I said ‘yes’
and listened
and stopped needing the rules.
How much to sleep.
How much to eat.
How to dance.
What to talk about.
What impresses.
What is accepted.
That anything should be…any way.
I forgot about what I say I need.
I participated.
I expressed myself.
I included and accepted.
I relished community.
I gave and asked nothing in return.
It was now.
And now.
And now…never thought out.
I relied on myself.
I adhered to my civic duty.
and, in the end, I watched it all burn and left no trace.
I let it imprint in my heart.
It is where all my thoughts came from thereafter.
Even here, where many people think love is limited
single minded
contingent
to be earned.
That doesn’t matter.
I close my eyes.
I see that place.
In everything.
That’s love.
It takes giving up on definitions.
It takes becoming who we are, even if that scares us.
It takes being and seeing what we see.
It takes getting it’s whatever we want it to be…
Love is beautiful.
It can exist anywhere and in everything.
even in a lifeless desert.
especially in a lifeless desert.
Let it burn.
SAMUEL PERALTA
Samuel Peralta is a physicist and storyteller. The titles in his Semaphore series—Sonata Vampirica, Sonnets from the Labrador, How More Beautiful You Are, Tango Desolado, and War and Ablution—all topped the Amazon Kindle Hot New Releases charts, and ranked at the top of the Bestseller lists, for poetry. More recently, the fiction titles set in his Labyrinth world—including Trauma Room, Hereafter, and Liberty—have begun to gain critical attention.
BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Because your father stopped in Strandja park
to point out that whirligig of wings—blue
argus, he said, Ultraaricia
Anteros—you were dazzled forever.
Those wings wafted you here, ten thousand six
hundred kilometres away, to the
University of California,
Davis. Encyclopedia of Insects
in arm, you haul yourself up the stairwell
of Briggs Hall. Your frail sandal spindles on
the threshold—and you trip, a beautiful,
crippled Lycaenidaen specimen,
into the butterfly net of my arms.
Somewhere in Texas, a hurricane stirs.
MOLLY GLOVER ON BRAGG’S ISLAND
Your hair, so carefully combed and severe
in its familiar cut, is shale grey now;
and when you lift your cup from its saucer,
your fingers, ever so slightly, tremble.
And in a drawer is a crystal shard,
picked up that fearful day you ran out of
words to say, took up a sturdy broom,
went through the house, shattered all the windows.
Some days it feels like your whole life is glass.
But if by chance the sunlight prisms in,
lose yourself in your springtime, run again
the island path to the top of the hill.
There, pull the ribbon from your hair, at last,
and let it flow out: dark, long, beautiful.
WHEN I DIED
When I died, I felt your lips close to mine.
Sweet death, your faint nocturne of musk refined
a serpent song of sleep, of trust, of peace,
a bartering of this life for blessed release.
You breathed me in, and with that breath preserved
what little of my fragile world deserved
eternal life. Embalmed in the amber
of your heart, a precious spark, an ember
flaring bright as my own life in me ebbed.
Until all that was left was in your blood:
my joys, my sorrows, the vagaries
of my dreams, now coursed through your arteries.
Then at last, I felt your lips close to mine,
twilight’s pome, oblivion’s kiss. And I died.
SPELL
Day’s eye,
bellis perennis,
your own name
conjures a splendid
incantation.
With each white
floret petal-plucked
from a fragile stem,
divine for me thus:
She loves me.
She loves me not.
She loves me.
She loves me not.
She loves me.
WHEN YOU WAKE
Tonight, when you are finally
sleeping, I will let myself out
by the eastern gate,
wade river, and the moon,
make my way to Luoyang,
where birds have come into bloom.
There, I will set down my baskets
and gather them all up for you,
so you find, when you wake,
by your bedside in sprays,
all the peonies of Chang’an.
THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS
The world will come to an end tonight.
Not with comets slanting through the rafters,
Or tidal waves surging across the coast,
Or the braze of volcanoes, unsubmerged.
Not with the earth’s decimated orbit
Spiralling it into a strangled sun,
Not with the rush of spurious armies
Turning fallow the scope of mankind’s dreams.
But with the last of your kiss, fading
From the sepulchre of these lips: it ends.
And the night sky may as well be shattered,
And the sun never rise again, or set,
And the stars may as well burn to cinders,
For all the worth they are, when you are gone.
TANGO DESOLADO
I am making love to the ghost of you,
blindfolded by the gauze of your pillow
instead of meeting the gaze of your eyes,
hands clutching myself instead of your thighs,
crying out your name and hearing only
silence. I am embracing history,
what I can conjure of our moments past,
the length and breadth of you that could not last.
I pull to myself the absence of your hips,
impale these sheets as if they were your lips.
Oh that I could breathe again your breath; instead,
this fragile passion’s one more little death.
My heart, or what is left, remains but true:
I am making love to the ghost of you.
SALT GATHERING
after Fujiwara no Teika
Dusk falls in Matsuo, late.
As the charred salt, wrung
From simmered seaweed, burns—
So smolder the ashes of this heart,
As I wait for you, as I wait.
NAGASU-JI
I saw you first at Daitoku-sen,
Lost in the stream, an unstemmed petal
Tossed between the currents of the afternoon.
You waved—before I could say a word!
Since yesterday I have been here at Mishima.
The wind blows across my face.
The rain is due to fall.
I will always remember you,
The way you were, last summer,
At Nagasu-ji.
AWAY
I will band my messages
to the legs of my poems,
and send them flying.
White wings against a slated roof,
they will ribbon into the air,
like the tail of an invisible kite.
A languorous drift across
your cheek, settling onto your lap
like a feather—
Wherever you are,
whatever you are doing—
they will find you.
DORI LAVELLE
Dori Lavelle is a mother, wife, and a sucker for happy ever afters and mint chocolate. Give her a great romance novel and a mug of hot chocolate and she’d be one happy woman.
SECOND CHANCES
Tonight, I didn’t wear the dress I’d worn the first time we met, and on all of our anniversaries. Instead I opted for a new, lacy, knee-length with cap sleeves. My hair cascaded in waves down my back, brushed until it gleamed, just the way you liked it. Today was about starting over, not looking back.
You sat across from me wearing a new suit. After ten years I knew every piece of clothing you owned. Every tie, every pair of socks and shoes. I had washed and ironed your clothes weekly. But what you wore tonight was not one of them. Certainly you were thinking about the future too.
“How have you been? Are you okay?” Your aquamarine gaze washed over me like the ocean waves that had rolled onto the white sand beach on our honeymoon in Greece. Those eyes had once been filled with love for me that slipped from your lips when you promised me forever and told me there would never be another. I had loved you so much that my heart had believed every word. Years later, as those promises wilted into lies, there had been another. A one night stand that had poisoned eight years of what I thought was a perfect marriage.
“I’m okay.” Six months, and my heart was still in tatters. “I miss you.”
My sister thought I was crazy for thinking of giving you another chance. She was right. But my foolish heart still beat for you. I thought I could move forward, away from a life with you, the life we had built together. I tried but failed. It dawned on me that I’d rather love you with a broken heart than not love you at all.
You blinked with surprise and hesitated before you placed a warm hand over mine. “You mean it? I am so sorry, Claire. It will never happen again. I promise…”
“Right now, let’s just take this one step at a time.” I refused to accept your promises. They were too fragile. We had to start fresh. Get to know each other all over again, because we had both changed. You were no longer the unblemished man I had once believed you to be. I knew I could move on, but I loved you. I knew I would be okay eventually, but I wasn’t sure how to live a life without you in it. I needed time to mend, to get used to the different kind of love I now felt for you, a tainted love, but a love nevertheless. One I was still not ready to throw away.
You swallowed, your Adam’s apple bobbing up then down, the tension melting from your face. “I understand. Thank you. Thank you for calling.”
From this moment on, actions would be more honest than words which can be spoken in moment and blown away by the wind in the next. The only promise I could make you is to promise to try to forgive you with time. But only time would tell.
THE PROMISE
I stood at the altar, swathed in clouds of silk and lace, smelling of Eternity. We were high school sweethearts. We grew up next door to each other and hung out while our parents met for an afternoon barbecue, talking about politics, laughing at jokes we were too young to understand, glancing at us fleetingly to make sure we behaved. We attended the same schools and kissed for the first time at a high school dance. And that single kiss changed everything. We were each other’s firsts and this carried a certain responsibility. We offered each other our intact hearts, hoping the other wouldn’t be the first to break it. We made love for the first time the year before graduating from high school, in my uncle’s cabin. It was everything we’d hoped it would be, because we learned everything we needed to know together. We gave and we received in harmony. Our love flourished through our college years. On graduation day, you asked me to be your wife, offered me forever.
Forever had always seemed so far away. Something you can always strive toward but never reach. You wanted to walk that road with me, side by side. Just like everyone thought we would. What was there to think about? Our fates had already tied the knot in our childhood. It was a done deal. And our friends and families would be so happy. It was what they’d expected of us. The perfect couple.
The word “yes” had exited my lips in a whisper and my hand trembled slightly as you slid the ring onto my finger, and with it, the promise of our future.
Then I blinked and suddenly here we were finally. I’d be yours and you’d be mine. The promise we’d made each other a year ago was about to bloom.
My heart hammered inside chest. I could hear it in my ears. Was this what happiness felt like, sounded like?
I looked up at Pastor Jim, the same man who’d christened us both. His face glowed as he asked me the words. “Will you?”
You didn’t hesitate as the words rolled off your tongue. Your bottle green eyes have never looked so bright. You were happy. This was your dream.
Pastor Jim turned to me, expecting the same promise.
I parted my lips to say the words as easily as you’d said them. Two simple words. They formed in my head, letter by letter, but died on my lips.
The silence was deafening as everyone waited. I licked my lips and tried again. And finally, two words of truth exited my mouth. “I don’t.”
In that moment it was true. You were the love of my life, I’d thought. But how could I be certain if I’d had no one to compare you to? What if we only loved each other because our families and friends had already decided we were destined for each other? What if years down the line one of us met someone else, and decided we’d made a mistake? It would be more painful than this.
As shock er
upted around us, I refused to look at you. But I had to. I owed you that much. I lifted my eyes and met the pain in yours.
“Why?” You asked softly.
A tear slid down my cheek. “I’m doing it because I love you,” I said. That was the truth. I’d rather hurt you now than risk hurting you later. I loved you too much to marry you with even a single grain of doubt. Maybe we’ll end up here again. If we were really meant to be. Or maybe one day we’ll be great friends and you’ll tell me of your true love, thank me for leaving you at the altar.
BLIND LOVE
We first met while you volunteered at the local soup kitchen last Christmas. Even without seeing your eyes or your smile, I knew you were the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Your long hair smelled of vanilla and felt like freshly pressed satin. I felt it sweep my arm at one point when you walked past me on your way, I believed, to the front of the cafeteria to hand out soup and bread. When our hands brushed as you passed the steaming bowl to me, the intense spark that crackled when our skins connected was unmistakable. That night I dreamed of you. In my dreams I could see everything. Your hair, the color of early morning sunshine and your eyes, blue like the sky from which the sunshine spilled. From behind my eyelids your skin was rosy pink and smooth, and my lips longed to skim along its surface, to feel your warmth.
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