Thanks to everyone who submitted to our Valentines call for submission. We gave poets the option to submit a theme of either love or anti-love. With the first post, Lindsey Bellosa, love takes an early lead. Come back tomorrow to see what we post next. Will love lead two days in a row, or will we spoil it with something beautifully bitter? Stay tuned.
Love Tokens
You hand them to me, quickly. Again and again.
Rocks, sticks. Anything you find on the ground.
How much of the world can you fit in your hands?
As though you are sending me remembrances of yourself already:
your fleeting blonde curls, your plump legs.
Time is eating us up like raisins.
Tokens: sharp cornered, dirty.
Sometimes we are as lovely as a painting
framed by watercolor daisies in the field where we play.
Sometimes, we are muddled like the messy corners of this house.
You cry with frustration, my shoulders hunch.
We are both tired. You will sleep, I will rest
and wait for you. The days stretch on and on, the same,
until they don’t anymore.
Someday, you will find out about beauty.
Someday, your hands will grow so large
the vast expanse of world will seem within your grasp.
I will remain, like a painting,
a worn memory of love.
Photography © Allison Goldin
Lindsey Bellosa lives in Syracuse, NY. She has an MA in Writing from the National University of Galway, Ireland and has had several poems and short stories published in both Irish and American magazines and journals. She won the 2012 Red Poppy Review’s Summer Poetry Contest. She currently works at Tompkins Cortland Community College as an adjunct English lecturer and her first chapbook, The Hunger, was recently published with Willet Press.
Allison Goldin is an artist living in Cambridge. Her work is a collection of spontaneous drawings from the imagination. The most common link throughout her art are the semi-recognizable creatures scattered amongst and bringing together the surrounding doodles. She is currently studying Illustration at The School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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