Love Poems

Untitled – Kleo Sincere

Your body next to mine,

Stiff as a board,

With the dorm room twin bed keeping us together like peanutbutterandjelly,
The moment childlike just as such.

This is the way I remember you most,
all curly hair and selfish
taking up space, and the only ray of sun that’s peaking through the curtains is hitting your face.

Here, you are more present than you’ll ever be.

Here, I found out the difficulty of sleeping next to someone who sleeps just like you.

We are human starfishes, laying on tummies like tired dogs.

Every sleep is treated as if we have a long day ahead, and even if we don’t we do.

That’s how love is like when you’re young,
Exhausting and
If it doesn’t smell like something that reminds you of your childhood then
It smells like coconut oil, and I remember looking away as you rubbed it on my sex as if you was a parent and I was a baby with a diaper rash and what I mean is,
I never had a man fuck me tender.
To care about pain as much as he cares about enjoying,
Entering me all nimble like,
smooth like,
butter,
a hand slippery with palm grasping at a neck turning moans in to whimpers.
Fingernails leaving tally marks of each passing minute on your back,

Before we collapse into each other remembering there’s so much more world then what’s right here, right now, so we sit and listen to it.

This is how I remember you.
Stuck to me like peanut butter on the roof of a mouth.
Breathing heavily and regretful, with sun making the oil on your body glisten regally.

What do you do with a love like this?
One that makes you weep from beauty?
One so mesmerizing you have to tell the world about it?
One that wakes you up at 7 am to count your lovers eye lashes?
What do you do?
When you try to imitate this with every person you meet?

Hennessy and Red Bull – Kleo Sincere

Love is something like:

4 am,

Drunk, dancing with all your niggas.

Something like,

sweaty bodies and carelessness,

different pace to the same song.

Something like, being in the moment yelling all the words wrong.

Like Chief Keef sounding better than Tevin Campbell “Can We Talk.”

Love is something like the hood;

Or the hood in you when everybody, including you, done moved out the hood.

Or my family back in ‘07 before the BBQ’s stopped coming.

Love is like, what my granny and grandpa have.

What my mama and daddy lack,

But what me and all my niggas feel,

When the music blasting,

4 am,

With nowhere to be.

Untitled – Naffi Koulibaly

I wonder how funny I look: young and eager, desperate and willing. I wonder if he can see it too. How the world widens when I look at him. I wonder if he knows that he does this. I wonder if he thinks I’m silly for it. Convinced that I could dream this real, I could dream this possible. A child still believing in Santa. Holding onto something that is not there. But he is real and pulsing right in front of me. I cannot be blamed for reaching out to feel the heat.