Yesterday was National Poetry Month

Manhattan Valley Lynn Melnick

Who am I if not outside, a blizzard and borrowed
but hardly noticed, a drizzle. Let's look at this objectively.
I am always cold. Every step is streetwater, spell

surrounds the building. It must be noticed, to wail out
sirens grandly, to scarlet a sky this stern and dreary,
from black to black to plum. Lightning has let me live

one more storm. It's embarrassing, for God's sake, how I stay.
Here in our hollow, the gourds grow impossibly up,
waiting for a comeback. Tell me what this downcast means

and I will tell you where I've run from, a street
with strains of summer, a room that cannot hold us in its grave
drapery. I know you so well here; I keep always in

the same arrangement, lolling extravagant, sinful, buried
in possession. This is lucky and lucky isn't what it used to be,
for either of us. Most times I am too unbraced to bear it,

quite soprano and flung. Where is the hand at my waist,
and the dancing? Not some tricked-out voodoo,
but what's all around me. I miss you, you can't even imagine.

Sometimes I bite to bleeding; I need things on a grander scale.
There are rules, which mean it can't be this cozy
forever. Hat on the bed, shoes on the table. We are doomed.

Today is also National Poetry Month

Love Is Not All Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.