Logan February
Made of Stone
Sometimes you are eating an apple, or
drinking gin at a terrible party,
so you remember the softness of your throat.
Sometimes you are dressed in nothing
but your heavy emotion, kept warm instead
by some shifting in the abyss of your belly
that makes you think: Oh I’m not made of stone
after all. Anyone can think of a sculpted boy
as gorgeous, but who looks close enough to see it,
the fresh sheen over the figure’s eyes? Who asks if
that is perhaps not the sweet juice of soft fruit
upon your lips, stretches upward to taste it?
That is rare. That is tenderness, like marble teeth
breaking the apple’s delicate red skin. That is love:
when he pulls his mouth from the salt of your grief
and comes away crying, too.
Logan February is the author of Mannequin in the Nude (PANK Books, 2019), Painted Blue With Saltwater (Indolent Books, 2018), and How to Cook a Ghost (Glass Poetry Press, 2017). A Nigerian poet, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl, Paperbag, Tinderbox, Raleigh Review, and other journals. February is the Associate Director of Winter Tangerine’s Dovesong Labs.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem does not refer directly to HIV/AIDS, but the presence of HIV/AIDS can be gleaned in some of the speaker’s emotional language. Write a poem that invokes HIV/AIDS without referring to it directly.