This April, I’m thinking about love (again, always). It’ll be my last spring in a city where Ive most loved spring because of how the city blooms: tulips, magnolias, people. In revisiting spots I love before I move, I’m also reminded of the friends I’ve taken there & want most to write into my love for / with / to friends (present, past, utterly bitter past). I’ve tried many times to write about love & it was never to my liking or maybe I wasn’t ready at the time, but even more daunting…what language even remotely tends to it all? And then, how do you write in a way that invites others to witness this too? So I’m reading and re-reading.

What are your favorite friendship poems? Mine are:

• For Grace, after the party by Frank O’Hara

• acknowledgements by Danez Smith (from their collection Homie, which is allll about friendships)

• Poem by Langston Hughes (https://poets.org/poem/poem-26)

• Laura, I want you pulling your hair back by Natalie Dunn

• Tomorrow is a Place by Sanna Wani (which is a superb poem on its own but one I love because it is written about and for someone I love)

• Somewhere Real by Shira Erlichman

• Moon for Aisha by Aracelis Girmay

• Paul Robeson by Gwendolyn Brooks

I’m thinking about love poems (whatever love means to you) that are quiet. Poems that treat the capacity/ability/act to love as resistance. Or: love that simply is. What are your favorites? Mine are below:

• Poem for My Love by June Jordan

• Object Permanence by Nicole Sealey (personal favorite no skip love poem)

• Love Poem in the Black Field by Ariana Benson (all of them)

• The Black Maria, part IV by Aracelis Girmay (copied below because holy fuck):

IV. what verbs will I use to describe the living of my beloveds?

Beloveds, if I love, what language will I use to love you in? If I see, what language will I use to see

& if I love & if I see you Then strike lines across the terrorful verbs, write:

“love,” “study,” “make,” “disturb.”