Dani Yourukova
Love poem for the space you ought to occupy
often, when I think about loving you
I think that I want to write about it
squash your face into the confines of an old-fashioned locket
heavy with brass and significance
like coiling a knot of hair around my little finger
or keeping an eyelash in a tin
I need to do this, in case everyone missed it
somehow, that you have a universe inside you
sprawling wide and wise, in deliberate vastness, and that
sometimes, I can even dangle my legs over the edge
marvelling at all the colours of your
visible light spectrum
Zeno’s paradox posits that infinities exist between all of us
and so the motion of drawing closer is a kind of fiction
and I feel that, sometimes, in the aching yawn
of distance across what are you thinking and breakfast
so instead of anything coherent I say
you are the opposite of a monologue about trains
and these are the times when I think about
how you never asked to be a ‘you’ in a poem
impossibly contained in
an amateur cosmic terrarium
is it enough to love the absence
of certainty?
how many old photographs there must be,
holes cut heart-shape
across the throats of people
who are loved
Love poem for the snail in our toilet
The cursed thing unfurls itself
slowly
like a tongue
in a porcelain mouth
‘Just take it out’ everyone says,
like it’s easy
except that you have to hold him
like you love him
cradle him in the webbed space
between thumb and forefinger
between curled lip
and compassion
I can’t do it but you can
I’m so lucky
that you love small
and terrible
things
Love poem for a future
In the future
my shirt is stretched tight across my belly
I am round, and smooth
as the globe of a terrarium and when I tell you,
your mouth spills open like a sunrise.
In this future we
control our own narratives, and in this future I
am smug and full, like a parental fridge and
together, we will cross the threshold
and pledge a lifelong commitment to
the inherent lesbian eroticism of choosing furniture together
and Sunday mornings
and I, against all the odds, am radiant.
So let’s scandalise my grandmother together,
let me weep openly at the altar
in honour of your eyebrows and
the lifetime of emotional fulfilment
that we are about to promise each other.
We’ll kiss then, and everyone will burst into
pre-arranged applause. And
I am still in my second-hand wedding dress, full,
and tired around the eyes as you
clutch my hand in the delivery room.
And after a tasteful montage
of heaving and crying
and breathing and
I’m almost there,
it’s coming!
Your hands are on my body
and soon,
a friendly cactus emerges
from my abdomen,
damp with blood, and
crowned with light.
Dani Yourukova is a Wellington writer with great hair and a bad personality. Their debut poetry collection Transposium is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in October 2023, involving: queer longing, a choose-your-own-adventure apocalypse, Les Misérables slash fiction and love poems about dead philosophers. Their poetry and essays have been published in places like Sweet Mammalian, Bad Apple, takahē, Turbine | Kapohau and The Spinoff.