A Craft Essay by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
HOW TO WRITE A LOVE POEM
FIRSTS
My first poem was about shooting stars. I was eight and inspired by a notebook with an illustration of a star flying across the pink-lined pages. I fingered the arch that signified the star’s movement across the sky over and over until the words came to me: “Shoot shoot in the night. Shoot, little star that’s so bright. You are like a candlelight.” Learning I could rhyme thrilled me. Written in second person, my poem spoke to the stars. I told the stars how I admired them. While I didn’t know it yet, it wasn’t unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning asking, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
My first poem was a love poem.
To write a love poem, one must be brave enough to speak directly to a “you.” It’s not easy work. It takes vulnerability and the threat of humiliation. Society likes to say that such endeavors are trivial, childish, and girlish. bell hooks writes in About Love: “Whenever a single woman over forty brings up the topic of love, again and again the assumption, rooted in sexist thinking, is that she is ‘desperate’ for a man.” When I was teen, all my poems were about boys and heartbreak. When I became a “serious poet,” my inner critic said such things were silly. It didn’t stop me from writing them, but I did worry, why would anyone care?
I started to arm myself with the words of hooks, along with Audre Lorde, Natalie Diaz, Sandra Cisneros, and more! These feminist poets and writers said that love poems were essential, and with their permission, I published a book of love poems titled Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites. So many love poems, I began to call myself the Taylor Swift of poetry.
My first love hit like a shooting star at nineteen.
I was a sophomore in college and living down the hall from a 23-year-old skater boy/young David Duchovny look-alike. A graffiti artist majoring in fine art, all the girls on our floor crushed on him, but it was me he liked, sitting long hours on his bed, talking with him. I remember he’d had knee surgery not long before I met him, and I liked to finger the scar. I rubbed against the skin, feeling the screws beneath over and over until he finally said, “That actually hurts.” I recoiled my hand, face flushed.
Early in our dormship, he took me with him to graffiti yards to watch him paint. Beneath his behemoth moniker, he’d tag my name with hearts. The love he gave burned bright as luck. That it could be fleeting frightened me, and I became obsessed with keeping him. Day and night I wondered where he was and when I’d see him again, until one day he said he needed “space.”
THE BREAK
It begins with him taking trips across the bridge to see his family. When he returns, he says something about how this may not be working. The trips grow longer, and you begin to hate when he says he’s going home. Friday and Saturday go by without a word. Sunday afternoon, he calls. He’s back on campus, but he needs a break.
You take down all the memorabilia from the corkboard in your room. The wristband from when he took you ice skating for Christmas. The drawing of your name he did in multi-colors. The movie tickets from when you saw Final Destination. The photo of the two of you from when he met your brother. You throw them all into a box.
By sunset, the room is clear of everything him but you’re still restless. Suddenly, you hear the smack and scrape of a skateboard in the courtyard. You peek out your blinds to catch him rolling through the square below. Your eyes follow until he disappears into the building.
You sit back down on your bed. Will he come see you? Your heart races. Is he coming up the elevator now? Breaths grow shorter. What if he doesn’t knock on your door? The room begins to spin. Then suddenly, the knock!
He sees the empty corkboard first thing. “Really?” he says. Your heart flutters.
You spend the night together, but in the morning, he says he shouldn’t have stayed.
“Please listen.” Standing in the doorframe, ready to leave, he takes your hands. “I need space.” When he walks out, the click of the door closing propels you into a tailspin. The week goes by in a blur. Classes go on or don’t. Each day that ends with no knock at the door drives you deeper from sanity. If you could only see him, you could be safe again.
You walk the campus, making up reasons to be where you know he’ll be. You’ve memorized his class schedule and his work study hours at the film lab. You sit outside his favorite art studio pretending to journal, but nothing. You’re a stalker, and you don’t even care.
Back in your dorm room, your roommate sits you down. She’s worried and prescribes Fiona Apple. She slaps the CD into your stereo and skips to “Love Ridden.”
“Listen to this,” she orders, “and say goodbye.” She leaves you alone with strict instructions to listen on repeat until you’re ready to let go.
She doesn’t know. The moment you wave goodbye, you die.
RECOVERIES FROM SPACE
Part of me blames 1986’s Space Camp, an obscure movie from my childhood about a group of kids in a summer program that are accidentally launched into space during a simulation exercise. To return home, they must first retrieve two oxygen tanks from a space station, but when the tanks get wedged in the station rigging, only the youngest camper, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is small enough to reach them. He’s successful, but the momentum of his pull to dislodge the tanks causes him to float out into space to his imminent death. Another astronaut must use a jetpack to propel toward him, grab him, and pull him back to the ship. If she cannot hold on to him, he will be left to float and freeze alone into eternity.
This is the image that comes to mind when a man asks for space. My college roommate wanted Fiona to help me let go, but in her lyrics all I could see was a long goodbye into a cold nothingness, so I told myself hold on. Aguántate or else!
At forty-two, I learned I was a codependent. In recovery, I began to see how much fear I carried and challenged myself to unpack the meaning of space.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “We are made of stardust.” According to Tyson, humans are made up of the same four essential elements as the cosmos. To me, this means space can also be the cosmos and a grand pattern of stars and galaxies. It’s a universe where everything has its purpose and place. And if I’m made of stardust, then I cannot be alone, even when I let go. To let go is to trust my return to what is my natural place among the stars.
How fitting then that my first poem was about stars.
At twenty-five, I decided I wanted to be a poet. At the time, Google searches were new, and when a friend told me I could search for people, the first search I did was for that college love. I found he was showing his art in galleries and making a career. I wanted to follow suit and applied to a creative writing program.
Since then, I’ve published two books. Within those books were poems to “you,” but the you was forever changing. So many yous, I could make a basketball team and call the team “The Yous.” Readers didn’t mind. Once when I visited Puente students at a community college, they only wanted to know about my love poems. “Oh, you love the chisme!” I said to them, and we all laughed. Editors, too, seemed partial, love poems being what’s gotten me into at least two top-tier journals.
When it came time to start a third book, I went back to the well of “you.” But now, in recovery, my focus had shifted. I realized that this new book had at least two more new yous. The last book had three. How many more times could I ask, what will make you love me?
I discovered that the person I was asking to love me was me. One way I found to show myself gentle love was to make me the you. Because forcing myself to re-experience a painful moment from my past—like my first mental breakdown at twenty years old—hurt too much. But by shifting the story into second person, I could allow myself grace. I discovered I could do this not just with me, but with my ancestors, my family, my friends, and even my community.
LETTER TO A POET
Dearest Love,
What I want you to know is writing a love poem creates its own kind of connection. Like a camera lens, your view focuses on that one subject only. They are all you see. In recovery, this is called an addiction to people, places, and things. It means that there is something outside of the self that has become more important than the self, or a belief that these objects will save you.
In “Love Ridden,” Fiona tells her love that she won’t call him baby anymore, and if she needs him, she’ll just call him by his name. If I need you, she says, already sure of her need. Just like me, she is not ready to let go, or else she wouldn’t have written the song at all. The song gives importance. Whether it’s a song or a poem, the act of writing creates a force with the potential to bond you to them forever. This is the power of second person.
It’s a spell, so be careful. Consider how long you want to be connected. Consider how important they are and if they deserve a poem at all.
The spell doesn’t have be for love. It can also be for hate. Though, I’m more comfortable with love, a hate poem has its place, too.
Who’s abused you? Belittled you? Hurt you beyond belief? What would you say to them if you could? What would you want them to know? How many ways have they wronged you? Count them! Sometimes writing out the injury can free you from it. And sometimes speaking up for yourself is its own love poem.
Who are your stars to be admired and who is space junk needing to be cleared?
Dear poet, what I’m saying is you are powerful. Your words grant importance, build connection, and each page has the potential to map even the smallest corner of the universe. Within that map, you, too, have a place, so allow yourself to follow shooting stars because they may just lead you to your path.
This is about healing. Audre Lorde writes in “Uses of the Erotic:” “When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.” If anything, what I hope you remember is you are made of stars. No love is complete without you.
THE BREAKTHROUGH
I looked at my newest poem in progress, called “A Lesson in Letting Go.” It went, “I promise to let you go / until I never think / to let you go again.”
I asked myself, what if I focused on me?
I rewrote the line: “I promise to let him go / until I never think / to let him go again.”
And like that, I floated into the stars.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and author of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press) and Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications). A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, her poem “Battlegrounds” was featured at Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and the anthology, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton). Bermejo’s poetry and essays can be found at Acentos Review, Huizache, LA Review of Books, The Offing, [Pank], Santa Fe Writers Project, and other journals. She teaches poetry and creative writing with Antioch University, MFA and UCLA Extension and is the director of Women Who Submit.
