Before I Meet My Love, I Met My Love

By ARAN DONOVAN 


wait for me. you have perhaps
been out there and married unsuccessfully
to several ladies. you’ve been maybe
like a feudal lord a little
gluttonous with your helpings, have gulped
up overly life’s rations of love and suffering.
ah well. they are delicious.
I come a little late to the whole shebang,
having wasted substantial time
watching grasshoppers
and reading old books. have acquired,
by way of dowry, an excellent recipe for
roasted chicken, some knowledge,
some philosophy, and a few tricks
(non-rhetorical) of the tongue.
we’ll see about that later. I too
am a little tired. a little wind-bit.
but if hope is a thing, it’s coiled
like a kiterope in my stomach pit.
are you waiting for me? let’s
get on with it

 

[Purchase Issue 15 here.]

Aran Donovan lives in New Orleans. Her poetry has recently appeared in Hobart, Juked, and Barnstorm Journal and is forthcoming in Permafrost. She tweets sporadically @barelymarigny. 

Before I Meet My Love, I Met My Love

Related Posts

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors

G. C. WALDREP
I am listening to the slickened sound of the new / wind. It is a true thing. Or, it is true in its falseness. / It is the stuff against which matter’s music breaks. / Mural of the natural, a complicity epic. / The shoals, not quite distant enough to unhear— / Not at all like a war. Or, like a war, in passage, / a friction of consequence.

Caroline M. Mar Headshot

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

CAROLINE M. MAR
That's a reconciliation that I'm often grappling with, which is about positionality. What am I responsible for? What's coming up for me; who am I in all of this? How can I be my authentic self and also how do I maybe take some responsibility?

October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

NATHANIEL PERRY
Words can contain their opposite, / pleasure at once a freedom and a ploy— / a garden something bound and original / where anything, but certain things, should thrive; / the difference between loving-kindness and loving / like the vowel shift from olive to alive.