In love,
in letters,
subversive in meaning,
emphasized in casual italics,
from my mind to your fingers,
from soft bone to paper,
the ink lingers like oil
smeared between blood and tissue.
For you, over and over,
from font to font with changing hands
that grow in time,
proposing my heart in offbeat rhyme,
these exclamation marks
are the length of your fingers,
tracing surrounding letters along my spine,
warm tattoos that I feel but don’t wear,
these question marks, my doubt –
can you live without me? –
a perfect chocolate curl of hair
from behind your ear.
These full stops, black stars,
that dot the pages of our history
starting here, optimistic,
and ending here.
Still hopeful.
These commas,
the curvatures of your body,
where the meat of your waist
hugs the bones of your hips,
out of place but graceful, beautiful,
the flick of your toes,
the kink in your nose, crooked, sharp,
unique,
and this…the final ellipsis,
forever insinuating, debating;
three loose rose petals pressed to the page,
he loves me, he loves me not…
In love,
the cursive notations
I read across your skin like
maps, in whites and browns
and soft pulses and plains.
Your words come to life.
Love,
the precious weight
of your feelings in my hands
like trust.
Copyright ©: Shaunna Harper
—————
The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
Poetry Monster — the ultimate repository of world poetry.
Poetry Monster — the multilingual library of poetic works. Here you’ll find original poems, poetry translations, ancient verses, ballads and even folk tales.
Poetry Monster (or even The Poetry Monster) — is also an international multilingual community of poets and poetry connoisseurs. Join us:
Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)
