Seeing Red

Though February is the shortest month of the year, it provides us an opportunity to celebrate Black history, companionship, and the symbolic compression of the color red. The hue of passion, love, rage, grief, and desire, red asks us to acknowledge and honor the connections we come across in life and all of their complexities.

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) 
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints; — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Borrowed from: Poets.org
Recommended by Reimar Ortiz: I felt drawn to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem for how it is written from the perspective of the person feeling love. The creativity and clever uses of ‘I’ within the tone of the poem can be interpreted as their desire to hold onto the love they have. I also like the continued use of adverbs in the poem, allowing the person to feel more personal with their voice.

Another Theory About Love
by Mag Gabbert

Falling asleep with the wasp still
inside of this window.

One of us is hungry.
One of us has given up.

Borrowed from: Poets.org
Recommended by Lucia Duque: The reason why I chose this poem was the simplicity of how Gabbert was able to capture the complexity of an unrequited relationship. The last two lines are reflecting the two people in the relationship; one of them is still hungry and fighting for the relationship to last, while the other has given up and is ready to move on. Even the beginning of the poem alludes to the relationship, having a wasp trapped inside of a room behind a window. It is able to see the outside, but is trapped by the glass, i.e., the partner being trapped in the relationship.

Written for Other
by Hsiā Yü

I write a Chinese character in the palm of his hand
Making it as intricate as I can in the interest of
Arousing his interest write it wrong so I can rub
It out and write it right from scratch stroke by stroke
Drawing him into one pictographic raft after another
Until I let the air out of the raft and we sink
Into the lake until I say I love you
With neither root nor branch nor a nest to rest
I love you I love you and I slow us down
Until we barely move at all until we hear
The very mesh of the gears upon our flesh
There is a cone of light that bares the fact that whoever
Invented the motion picture did so just so we would turn
Down the lights and learn to make love like this
In slow motion and in the slowest possible motion
I love you as we slowly
Dissolve into grains of light I love you
Until we then turn wafer thin
Without end
O I love you
I love you
Until we come to be strangers to ourselves
So that others will come to imagine
They have seen through us

Translated from Chinese by Steve Bradbury.

Recommended by Artrice Bennett: The narrative of this poem is so striking. It’s a love poem detailing the action of writing I love you into their beloved’s palm. Then it expands beyond the moment and I love you becomes a repeated refrain, a life raft to hold on to, and eventually dissolves the couple into something whole and transparent. It’s a beautiful poem with a heartfelt sentiment, but the strong voice is what really draws me in.

The First Madrigal
by Anna Swir

That night of love was pure
as an antique musical instrument
and the air around it.

Rich
as a ceremony of coronation.
It was fleshy as a belly of a woman in labor
and spiritual
as a number.

It was only a moment of life
and it wanted to be a conclusion drawn from life.
By dying
it wanted to comprehend the principle of the world.

That night of love
had ambitions.

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk
PI Issue #17 (2017)

Recommended by Alex Amos: I submitted this poem for the way love is described. As rich, fleshy, concluding, etc. It felt like a performance. Also, ending it with ‘That night of love had ambitions,’ felt like the story continues.

In the love poem
by Hala Alyan

we don’t run out of paper towels. We don’t watch hours of naked people bickering in the wilderness. There is no ambulance, no fireman asking you for arithmetic. The decade runs itself backwards trick of the eye, to a single night: a bar called Daddy’s, lipstick like a sliced finger, our harms like a bedtime story. In the love poem, there are only rhododendrons and open airports. Once upon a time, the bathroom door wouldn’t lock. Once upon a time, the neighbors heard nothing.

Borrowed from: Alyan, Hala. “In the Love Poem.” The Moon That Turns You Back, Ecco, NYC, NY, 2024, pp. 45–45.
Recommended by Kendall Wood: This poem, to me, seems to be about how relationships are depicted in poetry, or in other forms of media, or even our own idealized descriptions. Oftentimes, we explain relationships in an unrealistic way, and we are ignorant of their issues. The imagery is gorgeous, and reminiscent of Valentine’s Day in a way that sort of turns the theme of love on its head.

How to Say I Love You
by Marie Marandola

Practice:
on your mother
on your dog
on the friend at work
who knows how you like your coffee.

Notice how the words feel
in your mouth,
how they taste like something
you used to eat every day
then got sick of.
Hold them in your cheeks
until they are familiar again.

Wait for the right language
to present itself–it will.
One afternoon, he’ll show you
a joke on the internet.
The punchline reads,
“I love you like trains.”
And even if you don’t quite get it,
laugh at its absurdity together.
Repeat it back to him then,
then again in a later conversation,
until it becomes part of your lexicon.

I love you like trains.
I love you like trains.
I love you like trains.

Then learn to love trains.

PI Issue #22/23 (2017)

Recommended by Dora Jane D.: I found myself connecting to this poem because it conveys how absurd, uncomfortable, and confusing the action of telling someone you love them can feel, especially when revisiting love after quite some time. Marandola provides the idea of simply becoming comfortable with the concept through repetition, and how you may not understand love when first greeted with it, but that’s okay.

Duplex
by Jericho Brown

A poem is a gesture toward home.
It makes dark demands I call my own.

Memory makes demands darker than my own:
My last love drove a burgundy car.

My first love drove a burgundy car.
He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

Steadfast and awful, my tall father
Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark
Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

Like the sound of my mother weeping again,
No sound beating ends where it began.

None of the beaten end up how we began.
A poem is a gesture toward home.

Borrowed from: Poets.org
Recommended by Dharma Leon: I immediately thought of this poem during our ideation session, as it speaks to multiple interpretations of the color ‘red’ and love. It quite literally mentions a shade of it within the first four lines, “burgundy,” then it further explores this color by alluding to the transforming nature of “marks,” whether those be painful scars, bruises, or otherwise. The poem then transforms into that of a torn home, family, and the self, which beautifully exemplifies Brown’s explanation behind the forms name:

“I decided to call the form a duplex because something about its repetition and its couplets made me feel like it was a house with two addresses. It is, indeed, a mutt of a form as so many of us in this nation are only now empowered to live fully in all of our identities. I wanted to highlight the trouble of a wall between us who live within a single structure.” Invention, a 2019 blog post published by the Poetry Foundation.

This transformation of form speaks to the ‘mutt’ nature of our American society and the resistance to acknowledge our rich cultural origins.

It’s Cool
by Lauren Watel 

We were driving each other mad again, so
we left the highway and found an empty space
           by the ruins of a house. I stroke your chest
and straddle your lap; you kissed me with a low
moan, your skin gold in the light; I cupped your face
between my palms like an artifact; you moved
             my hips; and when you pressed your lips to my breast
you gasped. There was a man outside the window.
“It’s cool,” the man said, “just find another place
             to do it.” Then he tipped his hat, unimpressed
with the exhibition. Our mood now improved
dramatically, we waved to the man and drove
back to the highway feeling restored, well-loved,
glistening like two jewels in a secret trove.

PI Issue #13/14 (2009)

Recommended by Dharma Leon: Dusted from our archive shelves, this modern Sonnet by Watel is an exhibitionistic, playful, and passionate take on love or lust. The revelation of a passerby peeper added an exploration of society’s relationship to sex and the consumption/desensitization of sensual media. However, she doesn’t do this to pass judgement but rather in a fun tone.