New World Love Poem

 by Peter Schwartz

i want your super perfect pink cheeks

your daily fruitful

your nightly fruitful

your sweet and undying fruitful 

i want so much of you

that you must grow to give it to me

yellow flowers would be

precious but even more  

i want your germs and bacteria

your sludge and misanthropy

(of which there is perhaps

a single atom)  

i want to feed you an entire

thanksgiving dinner by teaspoon

to pet your rice paper armor

as gently as sleep itself  

i want to give you thousands

and thousands of dollars then turn

and walk away from you only to

show you what i mean  

i want to be your migrant worker

your sweaty lovething, return to your

fruitfuls even after a whole day

in the fields because i want to 

i want to make a peppermint gun

and pull the trigger every ten minutes

till i win your breath, to carry it

in my own lungs too 

i want to scissor with you and

laugh and laugh because that’s

not what men do to women and

then call you the silly goose 

seriously though, there is a part

on my body where my upper thigh

meets my ass that feels so spongy

and loose and dead i despise it 

like a stranger’s, for you, i’d be

just that, nothing else, and fight

my way back to regrow myself

right back into the man i am now 

for you, really.  
 
 
 Peter Schwartz's poetry has been featured in The Collagist, The Columbia Review, Diagram, and Opium Magazine.  His latest collection Old Men, Girls, and Monsters was released as part of the Achilles Chapbook Series.  He's an interviewer for the PRATE Interview Series, a regular contributor to The Nervous Breakdown, and the art editor for DOGZPLOT.  He'd love to make love to 'Mean Girls Give Pleasure' by Daniel Johnston.