Kim Addonizio, ‘What Was’, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems

Write about the relationship between an immortal and a time traveller

The first time you meet her she knows a version of you but you don’t know her. Not yet.

She’s exasperated, all heaving lungs, and you understand because she’s asking you, for once can you just react in a way that’s not subtle or gentle?

And no one has known you such as this, you’re jealous of future you, of the moment in which you jump into the right timeline. 

She looks the same. The dam breaks, a heart races, the river floods. You learn of her immortality.

What do you want me to say? I’m in love with you and I can’t because everything I love dies.

I’m not going to die.

Don’t say that.

Look at me, I’m not, not here, not now. I’m alive and that means you can love me for this second and the next and every other until you can’t anymore.

But not forever. Will I ever see a younger you here again? 

I’m always here, I’m everywhere.

My memory loves you; it asks about you all the time.

Yeah?

You look older.

Stay with me.

How long for?

Forever.

Mine or yours.

I’ll turn back time itself.

You can’t.

The sigh is gentle, an exhale that almost comes in a whisper of wind in leaves.

Look at you, the owner of time is running out of it. It’s a voice made of the sound of broken glass, laced with just enough agony it sounds like it could be spoken on a laugh. It’s not a laugh, it’s the noise the sand makes when the sea pulls away. 

I’ve never owned it, not like you.

No, time owns me.

If you don’t own time then why does your heart beat?

And the answer is simple, in a look that surpasses tenderness, eyes that rid the idea of forever, eyes that you’ve known in other lives, eyes that ask, how many times have you died for me? 

How else would I…

Your swallow interrupts, voice trailing off as a throat constricts. Instead fingers brush a strand of hair out of open souled eyes, how else would I love you? Again a silent question.

I can show you where it starts, you tell her instead.

Will it work?

The flicker of eye lids is all the indicator of uncertainty needed.

Take me where time can’t get us.

As hands connect, fingers intertwine, an old melody surrounds, take my whole life too.

It doesn’t feel like moving, more like warmth that sets every nerve ending on edge, more like light that tingles gold, fizzes beneath the skin. 

Open your eyes.

The sky is filled with stars despite the sun glowing hot, green and blue and orange, trees, flowers, grass. Nature and the sky, the oldest love story.

Where?

When?

There’s a nod at the correction.

The last moment before humanity. 

It’s never looked like this.

Watch.

From a distance a fiery glow burns up in the sky, and it’s destruction and beauty and creation and death all in one. It collides with the earth in a light that shakes the ground, and despite the fallen trees there’s a sense of life in the air. 

In every version of a life like this, that’s how time starts and also how it ends.

The raised eyebrow in question isn’t pointed directly as a reply, her eyes are still watching life burn and grow.

That’s you.

And the pointed finger indicates both the horizon and the sun.

I want to see it all.

You already have.

Not with you.

Ioanna Tsatsou, tr. by Jean Demos, from Collected Poems; “You Have Left,”

casual intimacy kills me every time. grand gestures are cute and all but seeing two people who are just totally comfortable with having each other in their space, who dont think twice about leaning into each other and thoughtlessly holding each other while doing unrelated things….. thats love

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl7k0_iA9Xy/

“When you begin to write you’re in love with the language, with the act of creation, with yourself partly; but as you go on writing–if you follow it–it will take you to places you never intended to go and show you things you would never otherwise have seen.”

Margaret Atwood, from the preface of “Second Words: Selected Critical Prose,”

the black art, anne sexton

oxeyed

Newspaper by Larry Sultan

@elenamjacobs

This is a very beautiful question and I am grateful that you have asked it. It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness.

I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

Nick Cave’s open letter to a Grieving Fan is a Beautiful Meditation on Loss

Joe Sugg in Strictly Come Dancing 2018

Launch show