Let There Be Love
but let it not burn or maim. let it run marathons
without ever catching on fire. let it breathe soft
like dreaming and move slow as January. let it feel like
turtles’ eggshells, like a 19th century oil painting,
like a swing set at dawn with strawberries on the horizon.
let half my blood turn to sugarcane and the other half
become the sea. let there be love, but let it sting only
in the right places: in too-soon goodbyes and wishing I could
steal the pain from your shoulders. let trauma rot in its own forget.
let there be days when you can remember the house at the edge
of your neighborhood without rabid fear bursting from
your lungs. days when my skin sweetens when it is touched,
and I can weave through crowds of men without turning into
a cemetery. let me melt into you- let me wake up to swimming
body heat and your breath in my ear. let me slip into trusting you
like a silken morning. let there be more to aching than crying
in parking lots, than dialing and redialing and redialing, than destroying
our best memories with caving doubt. let there be a hardness forged
from years of crawling through hellfire, strong enough to weather
any new breed of breaking. but let there always be softness.
let’s remember that forever is a made-up concept
invented when humanity was feeling overly-ambitious.
but let us live in it anyway.
Wanda Deglane is a night-blooming desert flower from Arizona. She is the daughter of Peruvian immigrants and attends Arizona State University, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in psychology and family & human development. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming from Rust + Moth, Glass Poetry, L’Ephemere Review, and Former Cactus, among other lovely places. Wanda self published her first poetry book, Rainlily, in 2018.
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