This poetry collection is not only a celebration of love, but an embrace of what has once been and what will come again
SHAMROCK SUN
By: Miranda Kanter
@miranda.kanter
I think of you as the colour yellow.
Those specs and spatters of dust suspended in light; hushed yellow as it breaks through your window. Your window, which keeps its back to the sun, so sunrise for us only happens at noon. A midday sunrise – you are a morning delayed; seeping through the Irish flag that covers your window, washing that yellow light green.
I think of you as the colour red.
As your rouge-streaked cheeks toning mine, untempered. By September, you’ll be well back in Belfast; I turn my head to the side and stick out my tongue to scrape it clean of the words I and love and you. Without time to wonder whether I really yet mean the words stuck to the tips of my nails, I tuck them into the hair that I brush back behind your ear, for you to take back home.
Back home, I eat as you fall asleep; fall asleep just when you wake. When I wake, it’s with the sun at noon, your time.
I think of you still as a midday sunrise.
POCKET MEMORIES: HOLDING ON
By: Ella Morale
@pocket.elfie
it feels so special to hold your
book with your pencil marks
scratched through it
i want you to mark my skin
i want you to fold my corners in
at the parts that feel most
important to you
TANGIBLE LOVE
By: Eri Dixon
@eri.ecdc
Hold the fire until it burns your hands then keep holding.
UNTITLED MUSING ON DAY #103
By: Florence Syed
@sleepyy.pixie
I had to learn the hard way that love should not be unconditional.
An honourable notion
But one that is dishonest
The way that I love is through devotion
I will spend day after day running my fingers through the knots of your hair and awakening early to place honey and bread at your feet and I will clutch your hand and kiss at your flesh in attempts to soothe when your eyes are wet
I will devote my flesh, time, blood, bones and anything you’d wish from me all that I pray is that you ask me to
All that I pray is that you desire me to
recognize my yearning to love you, to need you, to want you, to take you
But love without conditions is one that neglects the self
It is one that leaves the giver with empty hands and tired knuckles
One that gives and gives and gives but the reciprocation can never be of equal footing
Not when I deify you into a god and lie on my knees before you
Worshipping and praying in a manner that many would argue is unbecoming
But devotion has made me reckless and simultaneously weak
Weak knees, weak ankles and weakened restraints
and by placing you so high it leaves you in no other position but to look down at me
And that is not the way that I desire to be looked at by any lover.
EVERYONE
By: Annie Chantraine
@goo_g1rl
I want to be in love with everyone in the world.
My physical body is only capable of such a limited expression of love compared to the sheer scope of love I feel shoot through me like sun arrows.
I want to feel every heartbreak, every tender cheek graze, every tear hitting every casket, every kiss planted on the lips for the first time.
I want to feel it all and I want to make everyone feel it too.
I want to follow the thread that weaves us together.
I want to start at beginnings and cross boundaries of space and time and body and world
I want to return to you and start again, forever, differently each time.
Flame To A Wick
By: Harsh Patankar
@vantablackcult
Candied words like wisps of smoke
Float between our lips
Filling the room with the sweet hum
Of gods flame to a wick
When I eat the sun
Casting all in my shade
I’ll leave you the moon
The only jewel in my blade
Slick in my own depths
You refract hands of light
Many colours light a lamp
As I fall from great height
SWEAT IT OFF AND THE REST IS JUST A DAY WITH YOU
By: Emmanuelle Toohey-Carignan
@ithinkthatuh
Moonlight on the open shore
The streetlights glowing door to door
Your frame reclining on the floor
I don’t think I’ll speak anymore
What if I hurt you?
Wipe the plasma off your sore
Outside we chase green shining from lighthouses in distant dark
We ran through eyesore streets and dog parks
Let off our leash
What if I lose you to my longing?
(SUCKER PUNCH)
By: Anna-Giselle Funes-Eng
@annagiselle.fe
I think I might’ve loved you
In another life before
I wonder, is it selfish
To maybe ask you for one more?
Stand at the window waiting
You frost the glass with bated breath
Thinking as you breathe out the world
With lovely slow, uneven heft
Maybe I did love you once
I never can be sure
I think that if I loved you
I’d still want to. Just one more.