The Swimmer

by Christina Hutchins

Underwater I became a girl
with a young man’s ripe back
the muscles curled
around definite bones

But what you saw from above–
a blue-green daemon fraught with ripple
none of my lines a line–  I was broken
shuffled     yet I moved whole

It is me again     at the far side
surfacing     my face and shoulders
reassembled     solidity of my arms established
that settled years refunded

though where I stand waist-deep in the shallows
my hips     my thighs and feet     approximate
one of Picasso’s disarticulated women–
I cannot keep my unshackled forms still

from THE STRANGER DISSOLVES by Christina Hutchins. Copyright 2011 by Christina Hutchins. Published by Sixteen Rivers Press.

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.

Ghost

by Frank Bidart

You must not think what I have
accomplished through you

could have been accomplished by any other means.

Each of us is to himself
indelible. I had to become that which could not

be, by time, from human memory, erased.

I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable
furious spirit

so inconsolably into you

you would without cease
write to bring me rest.

Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew

nothing I made
myself had enough steel in it to survive.

I tried: I made beautiful
paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff. Garbage.

The inextricability of love and hate?

If I had merely made you
love me you could not have saved me.

Copyright 2018 by Frank Bidart. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 22, 2018 by Academy of American Poets.

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.

Autopainophile

by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

My favorite thing is slowly pulling
into my parking spot at home
just as the song I’ve been feeling
things to finally ends.

All these movie moments
and hand cutting wind in half dreams
come for me as if
sent by some light that wants
to watch me survive.

In the movies people like me
don’t survive and it’s the same
in real life so I make my own
movies in my head and I last
to the end and I am not
happy even in my own
fantasy but I am strong.

I am holding the camera and
pointing it at myself so I am
trapped in my own gaze
which is fine
which feels great
which is like the taste of my
own blood
which is great.

I wish I loved my body the
way you say I love my body and
I wish the sun would stay just
below the horizon forever.

Originally published by the PEN Poetry Series on May 12, 2016.

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.

Movie

by Eileen Myles

You’re like
a little fruit
you’re like
a moon I want
to hold
I said lemon slope
about your
hip
because it’s one
of my words
about you
I whispered
in bed
this smoothing
the fruit &
then alone
with my book
but writing
in it the pages
wagging
against my knuckles
in the
light like a
sail.

from SORRY TREE, copyright 2007 by Eileen Myles. Published by Wave Books.

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

by Muriel Rukeyser

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem” from The Speed of Darkness. Copyright © 1968 by Muriel Rukeyser. Source: The Speed of Darkness (Vintage Books, 1968)

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.