Happy Valentine's Day: "Dearest Love" by Ice Gayle Johnson

Dearest Love
by Ice Gayle Johnson

I love the way you love
Your love helps me live —
White clouds lie over our promises —
It protects us from the weather
Your music plays songs deafening
The static on the radio

This Valentine's Day poetry selection is from Ice Gayle Johnson's "The Key," release by Poets Wear Prada in 2012.

The Key: Lady Grizzly & Sir Charles Otter
by Ice Gayle Johnson
ISBN 978-0615606514
Soft Cover, Perfect Bound 42pp.
$12.00
Release Date: April 6, 2012
Now available at Amazon: http://amzn.com/0615606512
and from CreateSpace: https://www.createspace.com/3803444/ 

“Ice is anything but cold. These confessions of unashamed love, expressed frankly and directly, are warm enough to heat a city. In this age of ironic commentary on dreadful topics, it is refreshing to read these ardently unironic expressions of the author’s humanity.”

— BARRY WALLENSTEIN

Happy Valentine's Day! "Begin" by Chocolate Waters

begin

by Chocolate Waters

you came that night
you came up to me
that night i
caught
your eye
that night you
caught me

This Valentine's Day selection, "Begin" by Chocolate Waters is from "The Woman Who Wouldn't Shake Hands, released by Poets Wear Prada in 2011.

the woman who wouldn't shake hands
by Chocolater Waters
ISBN 978-0935060096
Soft Cover, Perfect Bound 46pp.
$12.00
Release Date: October 12, 2010
Now available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/woman-who-wouldnt-shake-hands/dp/093506009X
Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-woman-who-wouldnt-shake-hands-chocolate-waters/1031784398, and from CreateSpace: https://www.createspace.com/3601293

Chocolate Waters's house music is rhythmic syntax and sassily whimsical word play that disarms, and then shifts down into impassioned essence. She shares with Billie Holiday a ‘smoldering, smoky quality’ and a finely tuned sense of timing, sometimes holding onto a single word or phrase until it becomes pure emotion. These poems are of the self yet selfless. Revelatory, lucid, luscious and laugh out loud funny but so psychologically astute.

 ~ STEPHANIE DICKINSON, Award-winning Poet and Author of HALF GIRL and ROAD OF FIVE CHURCHES

 "Chocolate Waters writes in your mirror. Be prepared to gasp out loud in recognition." 

~ SHELLY ROBERTS, Columnist and 

Author of ROBERTS' RULES OF LESBIAN LIVING

Live a raw and sensuous life. Suffer it with wisdom, wit and vodka. Then using elegance, restraint and bite, craft it all into hilarious, tender, brutal, outrageous poetry. That’s the art of Chocolate. Each of us has either loved a Woman Who Wouldn't Shake Hands, or been one. Read these poems!

 ~ LYNN JERICHO, Writer, Counselor, Creator of the Inner Year

Happy Valentine's Day! "The Slip" by Michael Montlack

The Slip

by Michael Montlack

Is it possible

to have been tattooed

by someone’s soul?

Only with eyes closed

can I trace outlines,

a slight raise on my unmarked skin

(even in creases: inner elbows,

between fingers and toes).

The designs always familiar

but too abstract to identify.

I mean, can one be widowed

by the living?

Carting the blank stone

from days into dreams

toward an open grave

in my front and back yards,

basement, bathtub.

Ever eluded by the body,

not the scent.

And if there is someone else one day,

will he sense this presence?

The fine slip beneath

my rumpled clothes.

The railing I reach for

even on shallow stairs.

Will you

be the mosquito netting

draping my honeymoon bed,

swaying almost imperceptibly in the dark

but allowing in breezes

that comb the hairs on my arms, 

legs, chest?

This Valentine's Day poetry selection, "The Slip" by Michael Montlack, is the the title poem of "The Slip," published by Poets Wear Prada in 2009.

The Slip
by Michael Montlack
ISBN 978-0-9841844-2-2
Soft Cover, Saddle Stitched, 32 pp.
$10.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)
Release Date: October 2009
Perfect Bound Paperback Now Available at Amazon.com
List Price $10
http://amzn.to/eaV1i9
And on CreateSpace.com
https://www.createspace.com/3475987/

With pitch-perfect pacing and an intimate colloquial voice, THE SLIP reads as engagingly novelistic even as these memoiristic vignettes are untamed by wit and scathing humor. Ouch. The poems are at once revealing yet winningly imaginative as they reignite myth—there’s even a bisexual Orpheus here who helps Montlack to rewrite the past while instructing, bruising, and exposing suburbia’s lingering melancholy.

—Peter Covino, author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter, winner of PEN/America Osterweil Prize

The many moods of THE SLIP, from fabulous to funny to frenetic, announce the arrival of a promising new voice that can express, with consummate sensitivity and verve, the sorrows and celebrations of our complicated queerness. When Michael Montlack writes, he can make us sing or break our hearts. Each poem is a veritable “kiss of the artist”—passionate and memorable.

—Rigoberto González, author of Other Fugitives and Other Strangers

Michael Montlack's THE SLIP situates us in the middle of a life, threading together joys and sorrows. Some of the comic moments will truly make you laugh out loud. And at times, you'll get horribly wistful. Such is the richness of this collection.

—D. A. Powell, author of Chronic