The Writers’ Guild
April-May end of semester issue is online! See the printable [.pdf] of the Poem-A-Day poems!
March 2010 issue of Artifact is online!
The Poet Laureate of the USA Kay Ryan’s 1st Annual Best Poem Contest winner from San Joaquin Delta College.
The Weight of Words in Reverse
By Lena Reyna-Delta Student
I cannot write you
Not like I’d like to.
I only have Saturdays
I only have songs written out of someone else’s love.
You must take my words with you.
I think you keep them when I cannot stay
Because you know I will come back to find them
Written on your chest
Pouring out of your palms,
Stroke my hips again and there will be the first stanza.
The words are imploding my back into an arch above you.
I’ve only had one Sunday morning of you.
My words need more to deliver.
The poetry of distance is deceiving.
Words don’t tease the tongue—
They play the page
The in-between pawns us out to the night
And we fold into our beds as if the pillows will suffice.
The air around is strangled into longing.
I just want the right words to say it
But they are insufficient
The alphabet is too incomplete.
I can’t write me
Half as beautifully as you see me
There aren’t words swollen enough with passion
To pucker into a kiss worthy of the moment.
We leave too many messages.
Walk too many streets without a hand to hold.
I cannot write this poem
It has already written me
It is slowly writing us into a story of one summer when. . .
The words began to change--
the hand that writes them
the page that receives them
the eye that reads them
The poetry has claimed us
We belong to her now.
Winner (of Delta entries) of...
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