it's been heaven knowing you

nathanielorion

Nathaniel Orion G. K. / 11.21.24

junkjounral

[ID:

Writing you love letters in phlebotomy class

and watching the crease of my elbow bloom. I look in the vials and you’re in my water. Robbers of you. Coagulating. I’m learning new words: brachial, cephalic, basilic. Redefining butterfly. Dizzy as a centrifuge. Won’t you spin me, darling? Separate me into serum and plasma and lovesickness. Layers of liquid and you. Suspended in heparin.

I’m finding romance in what’s sterile. The preparation and the site of insertion. Kissing your hand and retrieving an alcohol swab, making a ritual of caring. Devoted. Is a blood panel a prayer? An appeal to a higher power? There’s an intervention between syringe and autoclave. That’s where I live. Cleric of blood, acolyte of leeches. Their honest thirst. Their small sharp mouths.

I marked you twice, once on the back of each hand. A bruise like a kiss, livid and real. Hematoma of love. Your stubborn veins. For a moment I couldn’t draw anything forth, and I quavered at your altar. The needle begs the salt to follow. Release and flash. Relief and sting. Then the hot wet pulse inside the vial— a tourniquet loosened around my heart as the proof of your life warmed my palm.

I line up my instruments and remember your lovely wrists. When it comes time to puncture another, may they feel the echo of your faith in my touch; how, when I asked for your love, you gave me your arm.

End ID]

enoughtohold

Because the road to our house
is a back road, meadowlands punctuated
by gravel quarry and lumberyard,
there are unexpected travelers
some nights on our way home from work.
Once, on the lawn of the Tool

and Die Company, a swan;
the word doesn’t convey the shock
of the thing, white architecture
rippling like a pond’s rain—pocked skin,
beak lifting to hiss at my approach.
Magisterial, set down in elegant authority,

he let us know exactly how close we might come.
After a week of long rains
that filled the marsh until it poured
across the road to make in low woods
a new heaven for toads,
a snapping turtle lumbered down the center

of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet.
His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out
of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell.
We’d have lifted him from the road
but thought he might bend his long neck back
to snap. I tried herding him; he rushed,

though we didn’t think those blocky legs
could hurry—then ambled back
to the center of the road, a target
for kids who’d delight in the crush
of something slow with the look
of primeval invulnerability. He turned

the blunt spear point of his jaws,
puffing his undermouth like a bullfrog,
and snapped at your shoe,
vising a beakful of—thank God—
leather. You had to shake him loose. We left him
to his own devices, talked on the way home

of what must lead him to new marsh
or old home ground. The next day you saw,
one town over, remains of shell
in front of the little liquor store. I argued
it was too far from where we’d seen him,
too small to be his … though who could tell

what the day’s heat might have taken
from his body. For days he became a stain,
a blotch that could have been merely
oil. I did not want to believe that
was what we saw alive in the firm center
of his authority and right

to walk the center of the road,
head up like a missionary moving certainly
into the country of his hopes.
In the movies in this small town
I stopped for popcorn while you went ahead
to claim seats. When I entered the cool dark

I saw straight couples everywhere,
no single silhouette who might be you.
I walked those two aisles too small
to lose anyone and thought of a book
I read in seventh grade, Stranger than Science,
in which a man simply walked away,

at a picnic, and was,
in the act of striding forward
to examine a flower, gone.
By the time the previews ended
I was nearly in tears—then realized
the head of one-half the couple in the first row

was only your leather jacket propped in the seat
that would be mine. I don’t think I remember
anything of the first half of the movie.
I don’t know what happened to the swan. I read
every week of some man’s lover showing
the first symptoms, the night sweat

or casual flu, and then the wasting begins
and the disappearance a day at a time.
I don’t know what happened to the swan;
I don’t know if the stain on the street
was our turtle or some other. I don’t know
where these things we meet and know briefly,

as well as we can or they will let us,
go. I only know that I do not want you
—you with your white and muscular wings
that rise and ripple beneath or above me,
your magnificent neck, eyes the deep mottled autumnal colors
of polished tortoise—I do not want you ever to die.

— Mark Doty, in Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS (1992), ed. Michael Klein.

beammeupplease

Edvard Munch.

vampiella

Fumi Kaneko as Juliet and William Bracewell as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, The Royal Ballet 2021. Photograph by Bill Cooper.

existential-celestial

Zoya Nazyalensky in Rule of Wolves (Leigh Bardugo)

ciarareads

[text id: Open the door. // Love was on the other side and it was terrifying. // Open the door. end id]

per-asperaa-ad-astra

When a physicist falls in love :)

Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946.

nevershootamockingbird

[ begin id: Black text that reads:
"October 17, 1946

D'Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that -- but I don't only write it because you like it -- I write it because it makes me feel warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you -- almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I will always love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead -- but I still want to comfort and take care of you -- and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you -- I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together -- or learn Chinese -- or getting a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the "idea-woman" and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn't have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true -- you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else -- but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can't help it, darling, nor can I -- I don't understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone -- but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You are only left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich.

P.S. Please excuse me for not mailing this -- but I don't know your new address." / end id ]

typewriter-worries

Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals), Barbara Kruger c. 1981

lascitasdelashoras

Zhiyong Jing - Bygone Days, 2025