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Cynthia Clifford

a poet who loves everything and lives in brooklyn

🌬️ Poems

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    🌬️ Poem: Nothing in That Drawer by Ron Padgett

    One of my favorite sonnets –

    Nothing in That Drawer
    Ron Padgett

    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.
    Nothing in that drawer.

    ∞

    🌬️ Poem: [Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up By Bernadette Mayer

    [Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up
    By Bernadette Mayer

    You jerk you didn’t call me up
    I haven’t seen you in so long
    You probably have a fucking tan
    & besides that instead of making love tonight
    You’re drinking your parents to the airport
    I’m through with you bourgeois boys
    All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts
    Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

    Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
    By a soporific color cable t.v. set
    Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
    The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

    Wake up! It’s the middle of the night
    You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander

    To make love, turn to page 121.
    To die, turn to page 172.

    ∞

    🌬️ Poem: I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again By Vievee Francis

    I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again
    By Vievee Francis

    Those who live to have it and
    those who live to give it.

    Of course there are those for whom both are true,
    but never in the same measure.

    Those who have it to give are
    like cardinals in the snow. So easy
    and beautifully lit. Some
    are rabbits. Hard to see
    except for those who would prey upon them:
    all that softness and quaking and blood.

    Those who want it
    cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons,
    any furred thing will do. So easy
    to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.

    I wander out into the winter.
    I know what I am.

    ∞

    🌬️ Poem: I Love by Jacques-Bernard Brunius

    It’s the week of Valentine’s Day, and I’m having my undergraduate students write sonnets and explore the magical love poem (or anti-love poem).

    I often look to surrealist poets when it comes to passion, eroticism, and love poems because love is often a resistance to logic and sense-making. Surrealism in poetry does have sense if you read with all your senses.

    Here is a surreal love poem from the French Surrealist poet Jacques-Bernard Brunius:

    I Love

    I love sliding I love upsetting everything
    I love coming in I love sighing
    I love taming the furtive manes of hair
    I love hot I love tenuous
    I love supple I love infernal
    I love sugared but elastic the curtain of springs turning to glass
    I love pearl I love skin
    I love tempest I love pupil
    I love benevolent seal long-distance swimmer
    I love oval I love struggling
    I love shining I love breaking
    I love the smoking spark silk vanilla mouth to mouth
    I love blue I love known—knowing
    I love lazy I love spherical
    I love liquid beating drum sun if it wavers
    I love to the left I love in the fire
    I love because I love at the edges
    I love forever many times just one
    I love freely I love especially
    I love separately I love scandalously
    I love similarly obscurely uniquely

    hopingly

    I love I shall love

    Translated by Mary Ann Caws