Tag Archives: love

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Curtains’

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He draws back curtains on a winter’s day.
It’s eight a.m. A charcoal sketch of trees
confronts him. All the world is grey
and unappealing. Nothing guarantees
a lowering of spirits as do scenes
like these. He peers outside. The thuggish sky
scowls back at him. Of all his small routines
this is the worst: he knows that, with a sigh,
he’ll draw these selfsame curtains yet again
in no more than a few hours’ time, when night
comes slouching from its prehistoric den
and all the birds of fortitude take flight.
He is a detainee, his heart in chains.
Love is a star long dead whose light remains.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “Titles are often an afterthought in poetry, with first lines pressed into service as titles. For this writer, titles matter, and Curtains is a case in point. For those who grew up in the 1950s, curtains implied an ending, often death,
a sense reinforced by noir cinema. The poem Curtains treats the word both literally and symbolically: the daily opening and closing of curtains in winter becomes a measure of time passing and of life nearing its end.”

‘Curtains’ was first published in The High Window.

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/
or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com

Photo: “Good Morning, Sunshine.” by caiteesmith photography. is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Valentine’s Day: Susan Jarvis Bryant ‘How Did You Woo Me? Let Me Count The Way’

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You didn’t sweep in on a snowy steed
Clad in armour buffed until it glittered –   
A shining knight of bright and mighty deed
Clutching ribboned gifts on which you’d frittered
A wad of dosh from coffers spilling splendour
To get your dazzled damsel to surrender.

You didn’t swing in on a torrid breeze  
With leopard-loincloth swagger and a smirk –  
A tawny Tarzan with a plan to seize  
His Jane from every predatory jerk  
Who prowled the concrete jungle for a chance
To whisk an ape-man’s darling off to dance.

You didn’t flounce in with a Darcy flourish 
Dripping in a nipple-clinging shirt,
Flushed from swimming with a need to nourish – 
An Austenesque Adonis hot to flirt
With she who fires the loins and kindles ire – 
That heady hex of angst and wild desire.

You didn’t breeze in with a crystal slipper –
A dishy prince of wit and pleasing means –
Keen to ogle toes and feeling chipper
Post dodging shrews in podgy-footed scenes
All fretting that their sweaty nether digits
Would fail to fit a sneaker made for midgets.

You didn’t burst in from the gale-whipped heights –
A fevered, black-eyed Heathcliff with a fetish
For ghouls who wuther through the squally nights –
Brash banshees with a smidgen of coquettish
To quell the hellish brooding of a beau
From moors where perished whores and ill winds blow.   

You didn’t float in cloaked in fanged mystique
With eyes aglitter in the gibbous moon –
A bold and batty beast of buff physique
With lust enough to make the bloodless swoon –
A peckish, gothic sucker at the beck
And call of maidens with a juicy neck.

You slid beneath my skin and lit my eyes
With beams of bliss that buoyed the bleakest day.
You hugged my heart. You rocked my lows to highs.   
You kissed my soul and stole my breath away.
No dreamy prose or rosy ream of rhyme
Can capture love that transcends tears and time. 

*****

First published in Snakeskin

Photo: “Vintage valentine” by seaside rose garden is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Valentine’s Week: Lisa Barnett, ‘Evolution: A Love Song’

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What’s evolution but a whole lot of sex,
the slippery, mutating mix of Y and X?
Man laddered up out of the ooze and the muck,
ascending rung by rung and fuck by fuck—
DNA colliding and combining;
brains and bodies gladly realigning.

Now let us in our turn embrace the dance
and give our separate genes a moment’s chance
to alter, rearrange, exchange, reshuffle
and triumph in the rude ancestral scuffle.
What’s evolution? Just a whole lot of sex,
the slippery, mutating mix of Y and X.

*****

Lisa Barnett writes: “This poem is a testament to the powers of revision. It had a long gestation (or should I say evolution); it was begun in early 2021 and completed in January 2026. For a long time it was just a two-line fragment…then a failed triolet…and ultimately evolved into pentameter couplets.  At some point I was reading Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which partly inspired the 2nd stanza. My husband is always partial to my poems about sex, and this was no exception.”

 Lisa Barnett’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Measure, New Verse Review, Snakeskin (including this poem), and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks: The Peacock Room (Somers Rocks Press) and Love Recidivus (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Haverford, Pennsylvania with her husband.  

Photo: from Snakeskin, February 2026

Richard Fleming, ‘The Prayer’

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I remember the cold, high-ceilinged room
where they had laid him, the smell of incense,
brass coffin handles shining in the gloom,
an aspidistra, dusty and immense.

To this small boy dressed in a mourning suit,
he seemed reduced, much less than he once was:
his scalp, without his cap, bald as a coot,
his fingers criss-crossed on his chest like claws.

I thought back to the day we watched geese rise
high over wetlands blurred with morning haze,
the laughter always dancing in his eyes,
his warm, familiar smell, his turn of phrase.

Life is so short while memories are long.
We the bereaved are left with words unsaid.
At the day’s end, he’d sing a lulling song
as I rode his strong shoulders home to bed.

A prayer unbidden reached me on a whim:
Preserve in me the things I loved in him.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “This is a shortened, rhyming version of a lengthy free verse poem that I wrote over thirty years ago when I relocated to Guernsey from Northern Ireland. Like many love poems, the original version, The Hidden Traveller, has stood the test of time. This version stands as a homage to its source.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/
or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com


Barbara Loots, ‘A Note to my Old Age’

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By now you shall have counted out my fears
on many fingers, and I count them, too,
because I know I am already you
remembering myself from your old years.

How loved you were: your hands, your heavy breasts,
your laughter, and the secret talk of eyes,
the vivid mouth, the spreading lap of thighs
(beloved woman, warm and fully blessed

whose laughter lined our face with troughs for tears!)
I write this down in order to prepare
a kind of perfume for your sallow hair,
a kiss, a love song for your wrinkled ears.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “Following a form of Yeats (“When you are old and gray and full of sleep…”) I wrote this note to myself in my 30s. Now closing in on my 80s, I feel not in the least wistful or decrepit, still waiting for that imagined “old age”. With the perspective of some fifty years, I can say that old age is not at all as dismal as this poem would suggest. For one thing, my hair turned a rather dazzling white. And love faileth not.”

After decades of publishing her poems, Barbara Loots has laurels to rest on, but keeps climbing.  The recent gathering at Poetry by the Sea in Connecticut inspired fresh enthusiasm. Residing in Kansas City, Missouri, Barbara and her husband Bill Dickinson are pleased to welcome into the household a charming tuxedo kitty named Miss Jane Austen, in honor of the 250th birthday year of that immortal. She has new work coming in The Lyric, in the anthology The Shining Years II, and elsewhere. She serves as the Review editor for Light Poetry Magazine (see the Guidelines at  lightpoetrymagazine.com)

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, ‘Homing’

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My parents stacked the best years of their youth as
Bricks to build me. Taught me words I taught
Myself to shout them down with when we fought.
My parents loved me, though I could be ruthless
Hurting myself with things I poured or burned
And those who loved me with the things I said.
My parents never gloated once I learned,
Just held me through my sobs, and kissed my head.

Now, in the living room I stormed out of,
They tell me I can stay the month, or year,
Because my room will never not be here
No matter where I go, or who I love.
I am their blood, they tell me. I depart
From them as blood does from a beating heart.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “A homing pigeon knows where its home is by training, as the falcon knows the falconer’s arm. But there are deeper instincts at work in nature that science still struggles to explain fully, like the way birds know how to migrate by looking at the stars, and the way monarch butterflies find their way to the same vast swath of oyamel trees in Mexico every year. Human beings have something of that in them. Not just for the neighborhoods where we grew up, but for the people, the family, who were there with us. This poem is about that. I distinctly recall its writing; I woke up at the “witching hour,” as I often do, while visiting my sister-in-law’s house in Texas over Christmas break. Ten family members were asleep in the same house, and, unable to fall back asleep, I picked up my phone and found an invitation to submit to a new sonnet journal in my inbox. Immediately, still in the awoken, excited, “witching hour” state (which the Indian tradition calls the Hour of Brahma, the time of peak creativity), I wrote this poem about the bond between the far-afield child and the fixed star of family, first line to last.”

‘Homing’ was just published in The Sonneteer which can be accessed at thesonneteer@substack.com. It offers a free, partial service as well as an upgraded paid subscription.

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). More information about his novels and poetry collections can be found at www.amitmajmudar.com.

““There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart…pursue those.”~Michael Nolan” by katerha is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

RHL, ‘How Sweet It Is’

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To be loved by you is like floating on my back,
falling asleep in the sea’s slack.
Sometimes. Sometimes it is more unnerving,
leaping with a wave for bodysurfing,
being swept facedown up the beach,
hair and ears full of sand.
That too is love, and grand.
Sometimes, again, I hope for more that’s out of reach –
(and you do too – don’t glower!)
and sometimes we get gifts hard to believe,
dolphins swimming with us half an hour
till mutually we and they
just turn away,
they to sea and we to shore,
and then they come back suddenly once more
and leap, so close, and leap, and leap again… and leave.

All those are in “loved by” –
the calm; the turbulent rift,
the sparkling fizz,
the sudden unexpected gift.
What can I say? I couldn’t, wouldn’t, choose to deny
how sweet it is.

*****

Thirty-five years with Eliza and still going strong. Who knew.

‘How Sweet It Is’ was published in the current Snakeskin.

“Free sea summer scenery background image” by Ajda Gregorčič is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Martin Parker, ‘Fifty Ways to Leave a Lover. No. 51’

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No bitterness and no recriminations,
no flesh hacked off in gladiatorial sport,
no claims for unpaid debts, no scornful laughter
to mock experience so dearly bought.

But differences all gently papered over,
cracks filled and memory’s cobwebbed cupboards cleared.
Receipts for all the good times carbon copied
our life divides more simply than we’d feared,

with dogs and books and vinyl all apportioned,
all ledgers balanced with forgiveness sought
and paid for with a parting smile.
For this had once been love – or so we’d thought.

*****

Martin Parker writes: “Sadly I can offer no significant thoughts about its background.  I simply wrote it then left it in a drawer for about ten years as it did not seem to fit with anything I was writing at the time.  But I do remember hoping that I had written something gentler and more civilised and sympathetic than much of what was appearing on the net at the time. And my ancient hope seems to have been justified in the light of recent reactions to the poem.

“My website at www.martinparker-verse.co.uk gives details and excerpts from my two hopefully humorous and only occasionally wrily depressing books in which parody, pastiche, satire, farce and poetic irreverence should appeal to all but the most po-faced of poetry fans.”

‘Fifty Ways to Leave a Lover. No. 51’ was originally published in Snakeskin.

Martin Parker is a writer of mainly light and humorous verse much of which has appeared in national publications including The Spectator, The Oldie and The Literary Review. In 2008 Martin founded the quarterly light verse webzine, Lighten Up Online at www.lightenup-online.co.uk, now edited by Jerome Betts.

Illustration: “|||||||| DIVIDER |||||||| — *** CAUGHT UP! ***” by Claire CJS is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, “The Only Holy War”

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Oh what a glorious war we waged on time,
you in your peacock pleats and jasmine braid
and ankle bells portraying a warrior goddess,
me at my laptop redeploying rhyme
like roving arrows on a map of fate.
We fought our Passchendaele, entrenched in bodies,
my dugout deep in yours. We woke up, ate,
went on our morning walks, we made love, played
old board games, ditched our iPhones, stormed the beachhead,
kamikazed straight into the sun
while knowing we would likely never reach it,
while knowing no Great War was ever won,
each night, each decade together one more mission
prolonging this timeline, this lifegiving war of attrition.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “My twin sons, so recently in diapers, just submitted their college applications. My beard has now more white hairs than black. How did this happen? At the cellular level, at the level of fast-twitch muscular contractions and verbal elan, time causes depletion, the radioactive decay of the youthfully glowing complexion, the degradation of collagen, the degradation of memory…. Sophocles, Goethe, and Yeats wrote beautifully into their later lives. Shakespeare stopped writing, voluntarily, when he was less than a decade older than my current age. Two things take me out of time: love, and the creative flow state. This poem represents (both in its subject matter, and as an example of my creativity) the intersection of the two. Yet time really doesn’t stop during that interval. I just cease to register it. The aging goes on, unchecked: the piecemeal conquest of the body, follicle by follicle, neuron by neuron; the tick-tock wastage of love’s remaining years together…. It demands a war effort, and total war at that, all one’s resources of spirit and body utilized to fight it: a Crusade to retake one’s youth, the war against time a Manhattan Project, a veritable Mahabharata: “the only holy war.”

‘The Only Holy War’ was originally published in the New Verse Review.

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). More information about his novels and poetry collections can be found at www.amitmajmudar.com.

Illustration: RHL and ChatGPT

Using form: Tritina: Nicole Caruso Garcia, ‘Love Poem in Winter, with Blackout Shades’

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Beginning with a line by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

My husband is a pale blur. The dark
turns grainy as the blue hour tints our bedroom,
my glasses somewhere near the nightstand’s edge.

He could almost be U2’s guitarist, Edge:
goatee, pale arms, black T-shirt, trademark dark
wool skull cap. Me: his groupie. His hotel room.

Distortion fades. Before he leaves the room,
I feel a toe-squeeze, hear an air-kiss: edge
of day, his way of sugaring the dark,

our portrait in the darkroom of a marriage.

*****

Nicole Caruso Garcia writes: “The inspiration for the tritina ‘Love Poem in Winter with Blackout Shades‘ came from a workshop led by Matt. W. Miller at the 2022 Poetry by the Sea Conference. He had us select one line from among a dozen or so poems by other poets, then use the line use as a springboard and incorporate it somewhere in a new poem of our own. My poem’s first sentence is a line from the middle of Aimee Nezhukamatathil’s ‘I Could Be a Whale Shark‘.” 

‘Love Poem in Winter with Blackout Shades‘ was first published in Crab Orchard Review.

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s full-length debut OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Crab Orchard Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her poetry has received the Willow Review Award and won a 2021 Best New Poets honor. She is an associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as an executive board member at Poetry by the Sea, an annual poetry conference in Madison, CT. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Photo: “29/05/2009 (Day 3.149) – We Are Sane” by Kaptain Kobold is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.