“That is love: / when he pulls his mouth from the salt of your grief / and comes away crying, too.”

Made of Stone

Sometimes you are eating an apple, or
drinking gin at a terrible party—
you remember the softness of your throat.

Sometimes you are dressed in nothing
but your heavy emotion, kept warm instead
by some shifting in the abyss of your belly

that makes you think: Oh, I’m not made of stone
after all. Anyone can think of a sculpted boy
as gorgeous, but who looks close enough to see it,

the fresh sheen over the figure’s eyes? Who asks if
that is perhaps not the sweet juice of soft fruit
upon your lips, stretches upward to taste it?

That is rare. That is tenderness, like marble teeth
breaking the apple’s delicate skin. That is love:
when he pulls his mouth from the salt of your grief

and comes away crying, too.

Husband is The Loveliest Word

In that terrible heat,
we made our feast. The oil
golden with spices, the skillet’s
wicked, dissolving whisper
reminding us of every old burn.
Savor of warm flesh. Umami.
It was very good. From your fingers,
the salt was a blessing. I had to take
my shirt off. To take the paring
knife from your hand. I wished
we had Bordeaux. We were trapped
in a kind of silence. When the song
ended, it started to play again.

“Made of Stone” first appeared in HIV Here And Now. “Husband is The Loveliest Word” first appeared in Palette Poetry.

Logan February is a non-binary Nigerian poet and graduate student at Purdue University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. They and their work have been featured in The Guardian Life, Dazed, The Rumpus, Lambda Literary, Washington Square Review, Africa In Dialogue, and more. They are the author of In The Nude (Ouida Poetry, 2019) and three chapbooks. 

Featured image: ractapopulous (Pixabay)