Poems for Valentine's Day

some sexy excerpts from my upcoming book "Survival Takes A Wild Imagination."

A Mughal heart-shaped jade box set with gemstones, North India, 19th century.

Happy Valentine’s Day dearests!

I love to love and I love love. In recent years, due to the nature and seriousness of my work, I really felt inspired to write poems about love, desire and erotics for my next book of poems that comes out in the fall entitled “Survival Takes A Wild Imagination.”

I wrote some of these as I was falling in love with my ex, right smack bang in peak pandemic, and after we broke up it felt more expansive to redirect the poems away from her and toward the idea of love itself… which felt very meaningful.

It was an important reckoning to realize that despite the strength of the love I felt for her (or the people I have loved in the past) it’s nobody’s responsibility to love me back. Especially if they can’t. Since healing from this particular relationship, maybe the hardest and most painful breakup I’ve had in years, I had to reorient myself back to love after feeling betrayed. I had to tend to the wounds, to the rejection of not being loved in a certain way, and remember that I can always love myself harder.

As I read these poems, I think more of the sensation of love I felt, detached from the person I was writing about, and it’s helped me understand the more global context of the love I was feeling — the expansion that that feeling of love ignited inside of me. Yes, I am Cancer stellium, thanks for asking!

What a beautiful experience it is to love, to be in love, and I cherish those moments. I am most alive in those moments. But the older I get, the easier it is to remember that it has less to do with a specific experience and more to do with my own heart’s ability to love so fully despite receiving a lot of poisonous, dangerous, and conditional love in the past… and I’m in awe of my open full heartedness to love myself and others deeper each year.

Sending love to you all, whether you be partnered or unpartnered… whatever it may be, may you fall more deeply in love with yourself today.

I love you, enjoy these poems.

I composted them after heartbreak <3

fa,