ECHO | Love Poem with a Lack of Conception

Issue 8.1 | Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Kayleb Rae Candrilli is a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award and is author of Water I Won't Touch (Copper Canyon, 2021), All the Gay Saints (Saturnalia 2020), and What Runs Over (YesYes Books, 2017). They are published or forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, TriQuarterly, Puerto del Sol, Bettering American Poetry, The Boston Review, and many others. They serve as an assistant poetry editor for BOAAT Press and live in Philadelphia with their partner. 

ECHO

When they look inside

your chest, the sonogram calls

your heart an orchid, each

petal pulpy and abnormally

palpitating. You and I

both imagined it would

behave this way, flowering

too big where it shouldn’t.

We have both pressed

our ears to conch

shells and clocked

your heart as it

gallops into another season,

another faulty

bloom. Perhaps it is just

a symptom of aging, to worry

like this, with every sense,

in every room of our bodies.

Perhaps it is

wrong of me to be so critical

of your heart—to want it

to speak more like mine.

Love Poem with a Lack of Conception 

In our raunchy love

we ache for household—

welcome mat, shoes strewn

or orderly, a kitchen

made of granite and cutting

blocks. We finger fuck

cumulous clouds

and yearn for a home

and a mortgage and a child.

How many times have we tried

to become

pregnant

during a storm of our sameness?

When we bleed it betrays

us in every way a color can.

I take off your shoes.

I clean you. We lay down

in no home

                  in particular.