“I’m sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.” —Richard Siken from “Little Beast”“You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.”—Marilyn Hacker from “Nearly a Valediction”“I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to drink you in. I want to walk into the heart of you and never walk back out. “—Nico Alvarado from “Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls”“Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.”—Margaret Atwood from “The Good Bones”“When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, in each place and forever.”—Bob Hicok from “Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem”“When I haven’t been kissed in a long time, I create civil disturbances, then insult the cops who show up, till one of them grabs me by the collar and hurls me up against the squad car, so I can remember, at least for a moment, what it’s like to be touched.”—Jeffrey McDaniel, “When a Man Hasn’t Been Kissed”“Kiss the mouth which tells you, here,here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.”—Galway Kinnell from “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”“I will love you forever; whatever happens. Until I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, until I find you again.”—Phillip Pullman from “The Amber Spyglass”“I wanted to write ‘stay’ on your sides,surround your bed with oceans of salt.I hope he folds you into a fox, loves you like a splintered arrow, brandishes the kill of your lips. May the bouquet of your hips wither. May the wolves forget your name.”—J. Bradley“I love you. If you hadn’t existed I would have had to invent you.”–Elaine Dundy from “The Dud Avocado”“And I’d choose you; in a hundred different lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”—Kiersten White“The first time I asked you on a date, after you hung up, I held the air between our phones against my ear and whispered, ‘You will fall in love with me. Then, just months later, you will fall out. I will pretend the entire time that I don’t know it’s coming.’”—Miles Walser “I will come back from the dead for you.”—Richard Siken from “You Are Jeff”“Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”—Richard Siken from “Wishbone”“Here we are, at the place where I get to beg for it. Where I get to say ‘Please,for just one night, will you lay down next to me? We can leave our clothes on,we can stay all buttoned up?’ But we both know how it goes–– I say I want you inside me and you hold my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.”—Richard Siken from “Wishbone”“Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.”—Jeffrey McDaniel
