LOVE POEM FOR LOSS

The loneliness of religion & cold medicine &
flared jeans led me to you. Jacaranda’s purple sails
marooned on the sidewalk. Goodyear skid marks you spun
in the church parking lot. Kissing you in a black Buick
the night before my grandmother’s funeral. I found you
naked in the front pew of priesthood. A sick lamb
in a congregation’s grazing. Come lie by me in the pasture
and we will graze together. We will rub our legs together
like crickets in the evening and listen to our hundred sounds.
Let our bodies be eaten up together, in the green grass
on which we lie, singing with joy. Come rest
your picked-clean bones next to mine and we will
decompose. Let me find my way back into the dust
which forms the cradle of my fragile body, and yours.

LOVE POEM FOR SORROW

Tonight it is you, blue fish in my bones,
thick scales cable knitting an itching
into my ribbed sides and under my arms
that no well-meaning scratch can quench.
I desire all the ugliness: your slosh-slicked spine,
sea air I kiss and spoon to my lips, shroud with my hips
in the night. I roll in your filth and my ears lap up your squelch.
Let me inhale the lonely musk. Ocean and burning flesh,
I take you into my nose. Sleep with me a while,
ginger stench. Drill your siren snore
into my ears. I long to hear your voice
in these octopus evenings, which tentacle
my body to my briny bed. Your smell is salt and rum.
Slender odor, stay with me a while. Linger.

Renee Kalagayan is an Asian-American writer and editor. Recent work is featured or forthcoming in, among others, Carolina Quarterly, The MacGuffin, HAD, About Place, and SoFloPoJo. She is the assistant poetry editor of South 85 Journal. Find her on social media @rkalagayanpoet.