Measure for Measure

Anonymous Love Letter I

for [redacted] from when we were in love, or the semblance of it I’ve never been to Malibu, imagine high-arched plastic feet and watery rum drinks, but I can do some thinking about it. For you, I guess I can do some thinking about it. When you say red convertible, convertible meaning transcendent, maybe, or changeable, I do some of that thinking I was thinking about, spew out a horizontal (or is it horizontal?) anyways, an orison. I don’t pray except in a poem. That, plus a blush, not the “darling-I” kind spreading over my face like sunburn from snow, no, a grapey, succinct blush, Alcibiades next to Agathon on the couch knees agape but it’s not agapē between them, the inclination to recline. This is not a poem about sex. This is a poem about sehnsucht.

Anonymous Love Letter II

Shedding the itchy bark, the years-old preservative around the four chambers of flesh that sit in my chest, is knowing that all parts of you reside there. I read that making someone feel safe is treasuring their lovability at their best and at their worst. I also read that bad and good don't really exist, but no one sits you down the day you are born to teach you this equilibrium. You teach me that there’s something in this air where everything seems to be an equal and opposite reaction. That my reactivity is just as special as my smile. I love you under, between, after, and in every moment of sadness, And I treasure you every time I retract with laughter. And I miss writing to you, so I thought that I'd sit down and make my fingers do their dance... My unexpected love (and I mean that the same way Con Dolore meant it), you still strike me like the first time the angels unveiled you to me. You are a heavenly moment, especially when yelling, because with every octave that your voice climbs I can see you much better, clearer. There is bark under our nails after every frost. It is hard work for us, to be a gardener and a tree. Winter scurries in between your fingers, freezing the remembrance of our old forms into breathing flesh. I am a tree fully grown, my leaves don’t scrape the ground anymore, and I love all of you.