After Dorianne Laux I’m in love with you, coffee, and with you, green ink in my pen, and with you, imaginary reader. I’m in love with you, recirculated office air that gets a little too warm, then a little too cold, because now I am putting on and taking off repeatedly this shawl I got long ago when I was a student, living in India for the first time, and it still smells like incense in Mount Abu, where the lake was named Nakki, fingernail, and the surrounding mountains were said to be holy fragments of the body of a goddess who fell to earth there. I was a little in love with her. I climbed long flights of stone stairs to visit the mountain cave shrines where she accepted flowers, coconuts, and cash. Shawl, I’m in love with your pattern of vines. Your border that runs wild. I’m in love with you, memory of how my body felt then: curious and excited, shy and defiant. Also you, knowledge of how it feels now: sometimes tired, or heavy with sadness and experience, which are often the same thing, but other times, electric, connected back to that person. She didn’t know much. I wasn’t in love with her then, but now I see her better. How she stood unsure on a rural road. Nowhere she had to be, and the forest lush and loud all around her.
Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College. See more at chloeAVmartinez.com.
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All those in loves caught my attention, and I read the poem with pleasure. It gave me an fun and interesting read.
Good work!
Loved this poem and the speaker's self discovery.