“Be Mine” by Bianca Stone
This “Anti-Valentine” ghazal by English Department Faculty member Vanessa Jimenez Gabb was published in Poetry Crush, February 2016. Miss Gabb is the author of the chapbooks midnight blue (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Weekend Poems (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the co-founder of Five Quarterly. Her book of poetry, Images for Radical Politics is forthcoming from Rescue Press in 2017.
from “The Lady of Civilization”
Don’t get married. A great love does not exist without protest,
my mother told me, have a beautiful run without law, with protest!
Organdyed from birth, godless in the system of things, in search
of some twin belief, a diadem in your mouth, you were named protest.
I named you and you went, taking extremities into you for decryption,
opening into wheat fields, your hands passing along without protest.
Everything that passes for voyage is us awash in injustice, mortal,
mortal, being young we bleed, loving nothing more than protest.
What could be more legitimate than an idea between us,
fatal or not, here or not, time must pass and so we must protest.
A love poem begins with hazard somehow, the concept of time, a cloud
calling itself gas, only that, and I calling that protest.
The personal is political!