September Poetry Compilation
The Sunstroke Monthly Poetry Compilation is a collection of poetry submitted by Sunstroke readers and staff members. Take a seat, light a candle, grab a cup of tea and dive into the intricate words of our community.
By Birdy Francis
“Self Portrait as a Hypothetical Lover” by Shelby Edison
I will love you incompetently,
forget the things I am supposed to remember:
your favorite color, your food allergies,
the year you were born.
I will respond to texts when you are asleep,
complete with too many typos,
procrastinate planning our dates, end up scrambling
and order a pizza, toast to it with the prosecco
I intended to pop open on my birthday.
You will say it is the best date ever;
I will never have the guts to tell you it was improvised.
I will not blame you if you call me another girl’s name,
burns from a past flame still fresh.
I will play with your hair while you talk about her,
practice the art of not being jealous.
I will be a lover that surprises you.
One who will cry in front of you
not after sex but in the middle of the day.
No matter how blue the sky is.
Eventually you will keep tissues for me in your pocket.
I will hold onto your Lactaids
for making mac and cheese.
I will never forget your birthday,
but might forget your half birthday.
I don’t know if I am a good kisser,
but will ask you to hold me close to your chest
when we are in bed together.
I will love like I don’t know how to,
make missteps fall, stand up with scraped knees.
Eventually I will learn to look where I place my feet.
I will not be perfect; neither will you.
But hope you, you hypothetical you,
will accept this love.
Messy and earnest.
With all of my incompetence.
“A Construction of Birds” by Taylor Margot Campbell
When she lay in bed each night, she would reach one arm past the chiffon canopy, and watch the shadows cast by the light passing through the netting dance across her skin.
She awed at how slender and beautiful her arm looked, and imagined that it was the long, white neck of a swan.
In the other room, her father was slipping behind another bit of netting, but a transparent kind you can’t see. His daughter worried that the same pain lay soft under her skin.
Why shouldn’t it when she had taken her skin, hair, and jaw, from him?
It was as if her limbs were something apart from her when they moved beyond that veil hanging down around her bed.
She was a construction of birds.
A man told her once, how beautiful her hands were, but she only saw white doves before her.
She wished that, before his eyes, she had fallen apart in feathers.
Swans where her throat and arms had been, two pale doves for her hands, her abdomen was a pelican, her legs a pair of herons, a hundred blackbirds for her hair.