Platonic Love and Other Poems

By Jess Whetsel

Platonic Love

Previously published in The Amazine

There is a room in my heart
that only you can enter. You forged
a key from curiosity and devotion, tied it
‘round your neck with fishing line, but still
you knock first, let me open the door. 
I welcome you in with a checkerboard grin.

Once inside, time rewinds, 
smooths the lines on your face. 
Adulthood is a heavy wool coat 
you leave crumpled on the floor. 
You take my tiny hand in yours 
and it feels like watching a rainstorm 
from a covered porch, like the 
soft pink belly of an animal.

How tender this love, 
unlike any other. 
How limited our lexicon 
for the spectrum of intimacy. 
How beautiful the truth
that is never too late –
that play is your birthright,
that it longs for a mate.

Alternate Lives

Previously published in Sage Cigarettes Magazine and miniMAG

i. 

I am a sea witch on the California coast. I take many lovers, but live alone. My little white-fenced yard is bursting with life: stray cats and succulents and sky lupine. The flower garden has survived every season of wildfire – a miracle, or perhaps just a spell.

ii.

I trust the nervous whispers of my heart, the lick of fire in my belly. We marry young, make a home for ourselves in the country. I build a trellis, train a rose bush to climb it, bring her cuttings of creamy orange blooms just like her daddy used to do.

iii.

I am loyal to a fault. While my first love snores, I lay awake and think of all the exits I’ve passed on this highway to hell, turning up the radio to drown out the sound of my soul crying for escape. Now there are no more off-ramps, just one lane of asphalt stretching through the desert. The roadside wildflowers reach for me, but it is too late.

iv.

I almost board the plane, but at the last second, I turn around. I rent a room on my favorite cobblestoned street, the one the wisteria took over, lavender sequins dripping from winding vines. The ghost of my American accent only haunts me when my mother is on the phone.

Afterlife

Previously published in miniMAG

I did not learn your name 
until I was a teenager. It was 
an accident, a slip of another 
relative’s tongue, something 
I wasn’t supposed to hear – 
or at least not from their lips: 
my secret grandfather, 
the villain of the family story. 

The rest came later, in pieces.
You left because you fell in love 
with a man after three children 
with your wife. You left because 
you could no longer pretend 
you were the man you claimed to be.
But I am the author of the family 
and I am rewriting this story. 
You left because you had
the audacity to choose yourself.

I doubt my father meant to 
keep his queer daughter 
from her only living queer kin, 
but that is what he did. And now 
you are dead, your ashes interred 
in a scenic cemetery states away 
from this hole in my heart and 
the corn fields and country roads 
you left behind. But that is not all you left.

When I miss you the most, I look 
in the mirror. Here is your Mona Lisa 
smile on my mouth, your blunt-tipped 
nose on my face. I place my hand on 
my heart and feel the swagger of your 
footsteps. I reach out, skin on silver, 
to stroke the arch of your cheekbone. 
No one can take you from me. 
You are still here because I am 
still breathing, and I promise 
you will not be erased.

Jess Whetsel is a poet, writer, editor, and public speaker based in Toledo, Ohio on Erie, Kickapoo, Seneca, and Odawa land. Her poetry has appeared in the literary journals Tulip Tree Review and Discretionary Love. You can learn more about Whetsel and her work on her website, www.jesswhetsel.com, or by following her Instagram, @jesswhetselwrites.