My Love Language is Midwestern (and other poems)

My Love Language is Midwestern 

weed yarrow redbud & browngrass prairie : 
snow snow snow snow & infinite crocus : 
all the way back to redbud & milkweed : 
there are more : honeysuckle shrub & shrug : 
the bloom we called honeysuckle for years 
before we discovered better : prairie : 
I want you to know how warm rain can come 
& down petals during July’s big storm : 
isn’t this beautiful? Infinity 
redbud browngrass prairiefire : I want you 
to know how it’s nice to feel warm : crocus : 
I want you to know I’m waiting for you 
to come back to this place with seasons 


Indecent Sonnet 

seven words in we stop playing scrabble 
to fuck on my living room floor : you turn 
your pieces over : I leave mine alone 
letters-up : E I I A O A O : 
only vowels : I have lost already : 
I want you to turn me over too please : 
please would you turn me over entirely : 
look! There is my blood all over the quilt! 
Luckily blood looks a lot like quilted 
roses & to be beneath you is to 
be beneath an idea of something 
found … luckily is a seven letter word : 
so’s forever & fucking & beneath : 

beneath you forever : I’m only vowels 

Metaphor for Lots 

at the top of the tower I can see 
green in the middle of city : at the top of the tower 
I lick salt from my fingers & read your weird book & eavesdrop on first dates: 
 
nervous people are addicted to bragging in public about unconditional love 
as it relates to their new dogs & how many 
mosquito bites they got this summer at the lake : 
 
at the top of the tower someone asks me if I believe 
in the beyond : if I believe in infinity : 
if I think god is tall : 
 
at the top of the tower someone tells me god is as good a word as any : 
I tell someone I’m too busy to chat & someone should read your book 
for an answer & maybe eat a sandwich : after all 
 
life’s about balance : at the top I don’t look back : 
at the top I can see the entire skyline & sky sprinkling salt : 
but this isn’t about me this is about 
 
infinity and water towers and even you : 
god : this is about blood 

Author/Illustrator

  • Margaret Yapp lives & works in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is a MFA candidate in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Previous work has appear in Peach Mag, New Delta Review, Mojo Magazine, and Contours.

  • The first nuclear blast broadcast live on television took place March 17, 1953, in northwestern Nevada. Operation Doorstep was meant to determine the effect of a 16-kiloton nuclear explosion on fifty automobiles, two wood-frame houses, eight backyard bomb shelters, and a goodly number of mannequins. The houses were built specially for the test, and the other objects were carefully arranged, as though for a dollhouse. The ostensible purpose of all this was “to show the people of America what might be expected if an atomic burst took place over the doorsteps of our major cities.” https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/operation-doorstep-1953