Under the glint of your glasses I will love you

and as the hiss of the last can of Sprite sizzles from your hand

I will drink your extra Sprite and I will walk your dog I will

love you under the yellow basement lights of the DMV

I will let you feed me foreign candies in the taxi to the airport

and on the plane I will give you the window I will let you

hold the Skymall and someday the lap pool darling someday

the smallest book lamp you’ll ever need I will never read Home

& Gardens I promise you I will never let the literature of housewives

bring us down even with an apron or a minivan I will

still spank you gently and always tell you love you when

you are walking towards the door I never love you more than then

Tracey Knapp’s first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award in 2014 and was published in September 2015. Tracey has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, Five Points, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere.

Website

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.