SMITTEN is LIVE!!!

SMITTEN is now available via Kindle @ https://www.amazon.com/SMITTEN-This-What-Love-Looks-ebook/dp/B07ZMG4HW1

And SMITTEN in print is available @ https://www.amazon.com/SMITTEN-This-What-Love-Looks/dp/1951724003

Please support this worthy cause by purchasing one or more copies.

As many of you know, LGBTQ literature and poetry is a small section of the marketplace. SMITTEN is meant to be read by anyone. Lovers of poetry. People who appreciate love. Avid readers. Indie book fans. Those who like anthologies and collections and appreciate diversity and a wonderful group of talented authors.

In order to continue projects like this, we must generate sales to justify and pay for their existence. I took a chance on SMITTEN and so have the publishers of Indie Blu(e). We hope you’ll support us by one or more purchases and by this you’ll support the visibility of over 120 poets and artists.

Whether heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian or none of the above, I hope you’ll really vote by buying a copy and letting us know you value indie publishing, small press publishing, micro publishers and individuals who try to give voices to the UN mainstream.

If all my friends and acquaintances bought one copy we’d have a success. I give back a great deal to our little poet, writers community with reviews and purchases and I’m hoping I can ask you to do the same for SMITTEN.

SMITTEN will be available via Walmart, Target, and Barnes and Noble in the coming weeks. Small book stores can request SMITTEN through Ingram. For bulk purchase please contact me @ candicelouisa@rocketmail.com

Thank you to everyone who helped make SMITTEN a reality. We’re all very proud of the superb poetry and authors who joined SMITTEN to make it the premier anthology of love.

(PS: If you like to keep both a print and a Kindle version of some books, Amazon is offering a matchbook price on the Kindle version of Smitten for anyone who buys the print version.

The kindle matchbook program is going away as of November 1, so if anyone wants to take advantage of this offer, do this in the next couple of days.)

Glass

Champion me

Though I may not deserve it

Lazy as I am

In ways of discipline

But I’ll give you my rotten core

And every discarded pip

The very dear and marrow of me

Just to believe

I’m a satellite in your sky

Or even stardust

Something rather than nothing

Nothing comes from nothing so

Speak again

We are all fools when in love

Lest our allotted time runeth dry

And dying we plunge to dusky grave

Unfulfilled, not finding

That God of morsel and mercy

What if when it grows final

And trees no longer spring their buds

For one more year

What if you are gone from my side and I

Empty without your solace and the shape of your mouth

See only endings without playback

I rewind all the years

Each bitter marinated cherry

Tart beneath tongue

A losenge, a comfort, a poison

You wormed into me and I

Never whole

Welcomed the intrusion

Your familiar vibrate a reminder

Not all that lives is alive

Without some movement

My heart beating faster for its attempt at love

Causes arrythmia and constriction

You wound around me a silken thread

One end tied to skin, the other dangling

Over the edge where all who dream

Must plummet

Let me then

Take your small hand in mine

And jump

For there are no safety wheels stable enough

For how I feel …

Champion me

Though I may not deserve it

I cannot eat without you, there is only

Nourishment when you look upon me

And my arms behold your surround in half light

Making prisms of dull walls and music in movement

We are figurines in our own clock, counting the seconds down to eventual loss

Let me loose then with you reflecting back

Our echoes in the center of the flame

When I close my eyes beloved

I see with your gaze the sum

And with your ears hear my cries

As I crest and fall beneath you in rivers and fire

We exchanged the key

With open mouths

Red from touch

And I never withdrew

Stsying instead

In the blossom of your kiss

Take it, turn it to gold, bury our hearts beneath the miracle

So long as I follow in your step

No time is long enough and no regret

For we are but whispers on the crest of day

It will dawn without us and I hope when that happens

Our branches and roots have thickly woven

Deep beneath our flight we become

Not two, not divided, but one

Reaching through time as I strive to call you now

With my longing and the pearl within my very bones

Champion me

Though I may not deserve it

We are nothing if not the wild in the wind

Dashing against our inevitable ending

Come beloved, follow the trail

Where it leads I know not, yet am I sure

If we fuse like glass nothing remains behind

But some memory before this

The match was struck

A scent of sulfur

You entered the room

And I felt the dagger of joy

We as thunder

We as electric

Striking down obstacle

Falling into mutual devour

The sweetness of eternity

Near in summer storm.

(Nothing comes from nothing/ speak again. Quoted from King Lear. Shakespeare).

There is just love

Among the strange hinterlands of neither young nor old

lies many adrift woman

mistaken for 28 by gum-chewing taxi driver

feeling ancient climbing steps, taking two at once

age is a permutation moving through blood and time

without oxygen it holds no discernible value

she could be your lover with her handfuls of thick hair held up by gravity of want

she could be your mother, stooping to ensure your coat is buttoned

her soft hands can be conductor, nurturer, passionate or flat for querying

why she must be contained at all in any type of jar or bottle

sent out to sea in glass of blue and green she sees all there is

and upon her return announces

she will thus forth be no age, no ones claim

but her own, velvet centered self

delirious of less nouns to describe her

she is neither straight, octagonal nor completely curved

she is a finely tuned instrument, played softly she can produce music

why should she apologize to women who cut their hair off in sharp buzz cuts

for keeping hers long enough to climb or why she wears dresses and heals

it is her weft, no more no less

and she doesn’t judge you for your penchant for masculine women or you for

your need of feminine men

why then tell her she is breaking the code by being who she’s always been

a woman who loves women

in all their unraveling glory

surely it is that loose dance around the maypole

when they were girls, rushing to catch the others crown

daisies so fragile in hot sweating palms

she saw the design then, of them all, like a quilt of differing

shapes ready to take to air

hers sought a reflection of herself in the depths

of what it is to be woman

that small crease as she laughs and your heart

vibrates with something like a bell

the nape of her neck nude against sunlight

how her shoulders form their musculature while remaining

soft

if she could put such things into words rather than

cries and whispers she might say

a woman was both male and female

holding the world up and bringing forth

life while fighting those who would call her

inferior and simply a loaned rib

oh quickly, quick let us mingle with your

preferred bone and become one

in the forming of calcium and other

periodic tables you see she and I

are of the earth and our very carbon

is born from within and without

beyond labels and understanding

there is just love

there is just love

 

This IS What Love Looks Like: Poetry by Women Smitten With Women

SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN; This IS What Love Looks Like: Poetry by Women Smitten With Women. Latest Indie Blu(e) Anthology is now accepting up to 5 poems/artwork per author.

 

Artwork must be B/W compatible on the subject of the unique love shared between women. Emphasis of Anthology is celebrating same-sex love of women, lesbian or similar deep attachments, in appreciation of this unique and beautiful connection through poetry and art (no prose).

 

All submissions please send to ‘editorial team’ at candicedaquin@gmail.com, likewise with queries. Share this in groups and with those you think may be interested. DEADLINE for all submissions JUNE 16, 2019.

Lace

On the outside

I button up well

zip my mouth in pink

comb my hair with calico

hold my faux ostrich skin purse close to chest

the powdered lady at the department store said;

yes, you will need to throw out your old bras and buy new ones

plumping her glossy lips as she showed me

a larger cup size and I

drank from my own, the last dregs of eleven am coffee

I couldn’t tell her

each one has a story, especially those broken

they smell of you still

their color is that of emotions I felt

when you unhooked them and took into your mouth

my wandering need

instead then, I nod acquiescent and purchase

three new bras for a stranger who is not me

black for night

white for day

violet for the hour

you again

lay your claim in my dreams

as I walk out, she waves and says;

you’ll be much more comfortable now

happy she’s done her job

dressing women with empty eyes in fine lace

she doesn’t know

for me, comfort is an emotion I have no need of

I like to feel your sharp ivory teeth

run across my skin and break

me open

spilling my seeds, red and glittering on the wet cotton

of our writhing impression

it’s more than bra size that cuts deep

leaving lines and circles of indigo and purple

colors for the bruises blooming inside

a field of damsons fallen from tree unpicked

for who now knows, how to make such wine?

I think of the times you tore

and rent and split

that wire artifice from my trembling frame

I remember the taste of blood on my lips

as I bit down in want and fire

for your fingers to beckon and curl

within the flexing circle of me

and that girl was smaller and opaque

like japanese lily she grew swollen with water

shedding her kimono stain beneath surface

swimming without need of air

to bend and contort like alabaster crane

between you and within you

her tongue no longer using words

to sate her impulse and your

hungering claim.

As I wait for the elevator

my head ever bowed in recollection

holding desultory purchase like fly swatter

I cross my neat legs and watch my shiny high heels

click together in tight voiceless longing

I am seen by all, as a demure, well-dressed woman

shopping without thought, her lips slightly open in musing

the mine of my mind is burning

for your take of me

and the memories

contained in

a crushed piece

of lace

Grace

If I am anything at all

I am yours

as the sun seeks the center of day to roar her rays

and sake world in golden waves

as earth breaks apart and mountains form

beneath water like temples surge

as your eyes hold me in their sway

the black of them, the holy place

as life lives beneath my skin

only when you seem to exist

there are times

captured and lost

never truly revealed

beyond our understanding

a chime of circumstance and gods

you are the priest to my implore

a song sung in aching hour

the fingers I let loose my soul

you are my gravity

you with your violet and your indigo

soul

there are places so beautiful my breath is stole

yet nothing, nothing, nothing I have beheld

can take the place of you in my heart

you are the missing part

you are the beginning and the circumference

even as I feel your knife

I cleave that much closer

it is my ritual to seek only

that place I call home within your own

we came from the same place in time

I was born of your need to be eternal

without proof of life

I exist and I perish

upon your word

you, the one I turn

you, the birth of me

you, the missing link

you, the key I wear

around my being

let me or deny me

I seek despite myself just one

who will never diminish nor could be

equalled in my heart

for some of us are old fashioned in devotion

a thorn could not penetrate more

that sea within me carrying your salt

if stained glass were more radiant

if storms could pulse with pinkening lore

if the world could find words for such things

I would still be

bare foot running the long mile separating now and then

then when you were my everything

now in the absence of peace

hither no meaning made itself known

for only in your arms I know

that steady belief and spiritual home

strike me dead the day I quit my faith

you are my goodness, you are

my grace

The expulsion of love

Where are you now?

Sitting on your stoop, first light, cats weaving between

coffee in hand, watching sunrise,

what are you thinking?

You are not thinking of me

the door is shut on us and you turned the key

it took only the loss of hope that gentle thing

and I became a stranger

so many days, months, years and still

I know you less

is it that easy? Was it that hard?

The expulsion of love

still live, dying on the floor.

I met you when the coals were

burning hottest, all I wanted was

a reflection of those feelings

you took my hand and guided it

into your clasp and pressed my back

with a deep

push into another world

the world of you

where I have been these many years.

They weren’t just words

though if I strain I can hear

the first you whispered

our curled against other in dark

your fingers creating universes

I felt their beckon

as I had not before

the press of you and the beseech of me

it was as if once inside

you claimed that part and as your possessed

I never struggled to be free

it was what I had always sought

to be needed at that scolding temperature

we barely survived our love

it burned and that heat was

the very raging heart of us.

Now day is long

you are gone in so many ways

absent in your once fine mind

emptied of the gentleness I knew

a stranger to me, a welted memory

it is not death, it is not life

I cannot talk to you, the only one I would

I have no solace in recall

it is like being tortured

there is only time, and they say time

heals all, but that is a lie

perhaps for you, already forgetting

I recall too much and everything

is a red road sign to us always.

The day I stood nude on white balcony

I did not recognize that girl who

had stupidly wanted forever and you

she wanted the innocence of us

how neither had ever fallen before

how you were virgin of touch and I

closed and shut up

together we opened the universe

you, it was only you and

it wasn’t me but for the echo of you

enfolded and besotted as no

future can replicate

there are some times only

once and never again

moments and feelings untested

who meet and create together

that celestial place in time.

I think of you now with a crushing feeling

as if someone has come within me, a trespass

thrown out all the certainty and warmth

leaving me emptied and discarded

surely you know that and pass it by

as your armored heart does not

recognize me anymore

there is nothing more awful

than to fade and diminish in regard

until you are no more than

a throwaway comment.

I walk the streets of my memories

like a widow in her veil

watching myself dry into a statue

of torment and you? You I suppose are free

it was always your selfhood to

change and alter in fickle flick of wrist

the time, the hour, in this case the girl

who stands in her memory palace

trying to rid herself of the feeling

it will only ever contain your shadow

and the footsteps you left

some bloodied, some too deep

to ever expunge that influence or

the sound of your whisper calling me

over time and space to some created place

where I am ever yours and never

free of that promise I made when you asked

me to submit and wed, the marrow to

your existence.

I did not understand how easy it was

to break and smash the very articles of

us

oh my love, oh my love

I never said it before, I never said it afterward

where did you bury my soul? And where

is the key to unlock that prison I inhabit now?

where being alone, I hear at night

the fidget and torture of your touch

over the fading moon an outline of

you and only ever you, it has become

an effigy to something once

consumed me whole and kept me digested

within you darling, to your very core

where I heard your life blood rush and gather

I became then, the child of you

she cries out now to your emptied eyes

turned from me, reduced to ash

as cold and unfeeling, as if never was

the burn and sear of branded emotion

we called us two and now only one

the loneliness is destroying me

inch by inch, I claim further madness

for you were me and I do not know

how to exist without, the belief we were

sewn in harmony with

each other’s binding, become all I know

all of me born, the day you baptized me

with your claiming eyes

deciding it should be me, you take

as your mate in this world.

Now our world has decayed to naught

you will not return, or have a thought

for what you left behind when you

closed that door

and

without sound

left the key to

rust into

red

water

Because you are not a stranger

Because you are not a stranger

usually I am too reticent, restrained, packaged away

in some hat box with a faded bow

to reach, to linger, to listen

I am a carefully tended garden without entrance

belies her wild interior and the need she has to be untamed

and still you spoke

tearing through the bower, the shrubbery, all my thorns

as natural if we had just been interrupted. having a long conversation

bounding into my life with that long-legged gait reminding me

of those California girls with skin you want to photograph

and ride on horses with until their cheeks get hot

no you are not a stranger

anymore than my French fatalism

is contrary to the opalescent sway of things

we all hang in some form or fashion

from our necks till light betrays our dreaming

and we must enter the sore lot of reality with something of

a bitterness

still tasting on our lips

that Chapstick kiss, faintly cherry

you have

known me before

we have existed before now

a familiar, in intonation and even

that shared day of birth

as if

the light

of the projector

and the quilt of screen

wrote us a history

far from dead ends that labor over hand outs

people who wear you down without

saying a word

with just the fatigue of their eyes

how they cannot see anything of that invisible world

we exist for.

You whisper; “with your eyes closed

you know the sound of my voice and its certainty

its pedantic, bordering on monotonous glee

because it is already familiar”

as something

grown before thought

had elected her bloom to

cover with fragrant reminder

every space of green with flower.

Sometimes even fear meets her match

in destined spots blessed by more than our

mortal hands

I think you have

some power of mind reading

when you turn the page

and set the needle to play

my tune of the winding road

I feel a circle

moving across my body

like a finger tip tracing

without permission and yet

necessary

the outline of my

shadowed self

brought into light.

You usher joy

spreading a scotch blanket

among simple earth and its undulation

though I would turn lobster red

obeying, the sun bleeds behind horizon as if

with the power of your intention

you had dimmed the switch.

Our hands wind together

yet

even if you hadn’t told me

even if I hadn’t known

your hands would have

given it away

as your mouth

a perpetual patient smile

looks to find

a way to speak

without words.

I would ask

what is your intention with my heart

like a concerned father

watching shifting eyes

only you stare back at me

unblinking and open

like a pearl within the care of its shell

it is always, you said, in the eyes

and I reply

how then did you know

before you found me?

when we had not yet

beheld the other?

To which you reply;

I wrote it first

I prayed for you

I dreamed it before

then you were there

holding me in your lonely eyes

like a lighthouse shall

dim only long enough

to light another wick

and surely

guide

sailors

to

shore

for the one who I know in my heart

knows me in hers

because you are not a stranger

and you never were.

Yehudit

We learned to swim

in the flickering pools of each other’s eyes

desire born in quiet step and curtsy

before I ever touched you outside this dream world

you were the betroth of my sleep

we circled each other in origami folds

acquainting, never strangers, always known

as if time held us apart long enough, to generate

in the deep cry of longing, a hallowed place

where only those destined for the other

shall like painted flowers, made of paper

embrace, release and turn to ink

coloring water the stain of lacquered longing

reborn on latticed wing of desire

to breathe again in the surround of this singular girl

for you, are my pendant, hung close to my heart

you do not tarnish or fade in intensity

you are the twitch in my smile, a muscle pulling

upward each time I think of you

it is as if, with every turning day

a part of me becomes dissolved

like sugar in tea sweetens what is plain

I am able to see in you, what you no longer can

those vestiges you put away

in a box too high for reclaiming

where your silver rings and sunlit hair

lies dormant, replaced by sensible overcooked hours

I was perhaps, born to return color to your cheeks

even as it grows dark I see your

sleek head bowed in feigned peace

knowing if I were admitted into

the sanctum of your unspoken sorrow

where peach hued roses bloom fragrant

there would be a blush again

marking darkness exquisite

as the silhouette of your dusky butterfly

brands my marrow indelibly

for it is simple; two people who did not plan

falling out of the sky, meet the other

everything changes, if they leave behind fear

we are not given wings, if meant to only walk earth

you send me to heights I could not

describe before you walked into my life

claiming my tiptoeing heart

we who are dancers of dusk and dawn

whisper secrets stored so long

out into infinity and beyond

she who is diminutive and siren

hear my song

The wounded eyed girl

Before I knew myself, uttered out loud the words

labeling me a this or a that or a who knows?

I developed feelings for a wounded eye girl

we were kids really, dressing up as Japanese geisha in my room

all festooned in asian print and a little tea set I got for cheap

from china town

we wore chopsticks in our hair and bowed ceremoniously

singing the only song we knew in Japanese

with The Mikado playing in the background

I liked her thin arms and her prominent nose

her knock knee urchin look and bandaged soul

I liked how strong she was even as she looked like she’d fly away

most of all I was attracted to her wounded eyes

for there is something heady and bewitching in

pain

and its infinite manifestations

we’d dress up, I would paint her lips scarlet, we’d put on

funny accents and roll on the floor looking up at glow stars

I still had stuck there with movie posters of vampires

she would fling her arm out across my chest,  tell me of herself

pouring out the suffering of her short life

and it was an awful life before she was

brought to this city we lived in, both from somewhere else

transplants, orphans, ghosts of ourselves with missing DNA

she would tell me of her homeland, how

her father beat her black and blue for

being a girl

why as she got older he took

each of her sisters one by one

and they didn’t come back

whole or even

well repaired

I wanted to lick the pain from her cheeks and hold her to me

until the wound healed

but nothing I could ever do would assuage

the wounds behind her dark brown eyes

so we played as little girls do

building camps and tepees and western saloons

once I played a prostitute and she a cowboy

I cocked my head, snapped a red garter and asked her;

want to have some fun soldier?

she laughed, such a lovely laugh

her black hair and coffee skin, shining with fantasy

she didn’t like being herself anymore than me

we got into our pretend saloon bed

I served her a pretend shot of whiskey

acted ‘saucy’ the way I had learned from TV

she rolled her eyes laboriously like a comedian winking

pulled up my petticoats which were real

and at one point had been my mother’s wedding dress

when she married my father, bare foot and broke

with a velvet ribbon tied around her neck

and our fingers explored each other

as we giggled and changed our voices to all the favorite

TV characters we knew

I think I even tried to be Sue Ellen

I wanted to tell her then, not to stop

to press my mouth to her pomegranate lips

touch her swelling breasts with my own lack of

run myself like a cat across her saffron skin

but even then I knew

damage makes bad bed fellows

we soon changed the game, to cops and robbers

climbing out of the window, swinging from trees

though in every story

there was an element of romance

I thought of the old shows I loved

where the actors were always

dancing around the circumference

of each others heart

how in real life sometimes they married

I told my father; Oh see! Oh see! pretend things can come real!

but some cannot

and she and I grew up

once she told me she had always known I felt like that

I blushed dark red because of course

thinking I’d been subtle when watching her changing clothes

she married a blonde haired man and moved to Australia

had a little boy and hopefully

a ceasing of her alotment of pain

because more than anything I wanted that for her

even more than the beautiful moment

of two girls

laying in sunlight

laughing at imagined things

for the rest and peace and escape

of anything real