I’m digesting a change,
resuscitating hope. Tattoed Love across my body
to invoke what it flames for.
Too often I’ve crawled naked for love,
called upon God to slaughter my desire
when love was invisible but not extinct.
I want a future union that’s ocean heavy,
a graphene bond coated in grace.
The waiting crawls through my organs.
and I wake up boxing for love.
I would trade the colossal home I built for me and my future love
for a straitjacket to bind my needs.
I even paid tithes to the wind to blow love
on my path, all to watch the payoff show up
on other’s doorsteps. I resurrect what I bury, asking
for a love, unveiled, that looks
like a door to a galaxy of daffodils.
Click here to read Oak Morse on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by Jessica Fadel on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
Oak Morse lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches creative writing and theatre and leads a youth poetry troop, the Phoenix Fire-Spitters. He was the winner of the 2017 Magpie Award for Poetry in Pulp Literature, a Finalist for the 2020 Witness Literary Award and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Currently a Warren Wilson MFA candidate, Oak has received a Pushcart Prize nomination, fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and Twelve Literary Arts as well as a Stars in the Classroom honor from the Houston Texans. A recipient of the 2021 Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, his work appears in Black Warrior Review, Tupelo, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Nimrod, Terrain.org, Obsidian, among others.
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