Meow Meow Pow Pow
  • About
  • Recent Issues
  • Submission Guidelines
  • Pup Pup Blog
  • SUPERFAN
  • Contact
  • About
  • Recent Issues
  • Submission Guidelines
  • Pup Pup Blog
  • SUPERFAN
  • Contact
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

Picture

​Pup Pup blog

2/7/2019

Chorus blog: Love Letters

Picture
a rustling of love letters
by Alex Simand
​

I have a shoe box of knickknacks and love letters under my bed. turkey feathers. bandannas with maps printed on them. watercolors of song lyrics. little fossils of affection. they’re growing dust motes like mohawks spurting from their scalps and a bundle of spurned kitten fur and I wonder if I’m a neglectful father or if I should toss them into the trash next to last week’s lasagna. why do we keep these little trinkets of past loves? do we betray our futures by keeping truncated tokens of adoration within arms reach? I don’t know. I don’t know most things, but least of all of all this.

the last time I moved apartments, the box spilled out and I stood agape at the flood at my feet. arms spread with helplessness. I couldn’t scoop it up any more than I could hold a puddle in my palm. what do I do with every feeling I’ve ever had? what does it mean to have collected the sand from a beach for another person? there it was, spilling out of the topless jar that held, seeping into the hardwood, becoming hardwood, fading it, softening it, filling it with rot from the inside out. my skull is as squishy as a newborn’s head. 

I have a rustling shoe box under my bed. from time to time, it slides out as if to say, hey. hey, remember that time you were tender? yes. remember when you were loved so hard they wanted to leave a mark of it? yes. I want the box to push its lid off like a boiling pot. I want to feel it ticking under my sleep. I want it to elect its next president, someone kind, like what a whisper looks like on a page. move over turkey feathers. there’s always room for one more.



Picture
que lastima, we cannot burn forever
unless our energy remembers 
each other’s embers
Comfort Food
by Brennan DeFrisco
a cookbook is a love letter--

tastes of bread yeast when tossed, taffy when pulled
spun sugar brought up from Georgia

​smells like love that never stops simmering
when we cook together
if we sizzle in the kitchen,

should we then burn the bed?
blue pilot light of our flammable bodies
spread across the stove top, constantly clicking

que lastima, we cannot burn forever
unless our energy remembers
each other’s embers

when the wind won’t lend itself to words
& the frost-covered burner remembers
& I become a kettle, screaming your name

pans as warm as your palms
cuffing the back of my neck
as we take turns stirring, you whisper,
​

                          B,
                                        you’re the only recipe
                                         I never want to share



Picture
[sticker by a Philadelphia sticker graffiti artist] 
post-it notes
by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
​
There are days when I’ve loved you like a mirror and I’m hypnotized; you’re my reflection’s self. The other night, laying on the couch opposite-ended like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you took a photo of me with your phone when I wasn’t looking and texted it to me. We were playing time machine, which is when minutes don’t tick by while under a blanket that resembles a Hershey bar. Sometimes boredom and comfort look very similar.

I looked old, and dry, and tired. I didn’t love you like the mirror of me having learned to thank my parts as I stared at the phone. Suffocating and sweating under the burden of the blankets, we became strangers.


I’ve been known to love you like we’re halved. Asymmetrical. Pieced together to make a whole. We’ve replaced letters with texts and the one on my phone with my face yellow in the lamp’s shade filled me with an unrecognizable feeling. The closest emotion to give it is loss. How can looking at me make me feel the loss of you? We aren’t under the blanket anymore. In the days following, sometimes I would look at the texted photo of the strange woman.

​I have piles of post-it notes I’ve written to myself periodically throughout the years scattered all over my home in various rainbows of aging beige. Memories of my moments, and when I read them I can see how I actually look. Or at least how I think I look. In the mountains of fluttered sticky notes, sometimes I see a shadow of our asymmetrical features never quite touching. I need to take the time to read them in order to see this. I don’t do that often.
​
I hold a random bundle of post-it notes to my chest to staunch the river’s flow of loss, like the loss of years and the loss of youth and the loss of moments I forgot to commit to the notes to remember so then I’ve forgotten them. Footnotes to a life lived as a time machine.

​Years ago I set-up a calendar alert for Valentine’s Day and made it seem like it was a love letter from a stranger. On the day I got it, I thought maybe you snuck on my phone and programmed the surprise. Then I remembered. In the years passing, I would send myself candy grams during office Valentine’s Days. And I never forgot who values me the most.

​I delete the text you sent me.



Picture

Love Letters
by J. Sam Williams
Picture
Are my love letters filled with truth or lies?
Do they cause highs or cries?
I would surmise, that you agonize over words that jeopardize yet hypnotize.

While you demonize, I attempt to moralize
While I revise, you militarize.
Is it you, or is it me that dramatize and oversize the problems that are pint-size?

I write letters that reprise and justify
But they only terrorize and galvanize
I write to apologize, you say I only finalize and eulogize, not humanize

I try to revitalize and romanticize
But you don’t empathize or recognize,
So, our relationship is an illegitimate enterprise, so I internalize and compartmentalize.

​

Picture

Comments are closed.

    Author

    Our fabulous blog team

    Archives

    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    September 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017

    Categories

    All 12 Songs Art Art And Athletes Book Review Chorus Blog Date This Book Game Of Narratives Guest Blog Letter From The Editor Lifehacks Movies Of 2019 Music Pup Sounds Smackdown Strive For 55 Summer Playlists Zines

    RSS Feed

Photos from Gary Robson., Carlosbrknews, yahoo201027, Dick Thomas Johnson, BAMCorp, Casey Hugelfink, Howard O. Young, redfoxinict, Corvair Owner, Rosmarie Voegtli, Tambako the Jaguar