POET OF THE MONTH - march 2021
Please join us in congratulating our March 2021 Poet of the Month, Isabella Fiore!
isabella fiore (she/they) is a writer who chronicles her experiences through love, sadness, and figuring out what it means to be a queer "woman" in her world. she comes from southern ontario, where she writes through her last year of high school through refreshingly honest poetry and experiments with form that she's still uncertain about. her publications include WEIGHT journal and TEEN-ZINE, and she is a staff writer at The Aurora Journal. there, you can find her confessions about mental illness, back pain, and other thoughts she decides to yell into the abyss in lowercase letters. when she is not writing, isabella can be found baking, napping, or wrapping herself in a blanket like a burrito.
you can read her poems below.
o
or
lace/leather/we all
know no one loves me
isabella fiore
longing
something lovely
rose petals and perfume bubble bath like a queen
here i am waiting to hear
your name. pink lingerie
lace leather
love you is too far to jump to.
i can act
though
call for you with a sweet grin,
as real
as it needs to be
lover you don’t love me either
i set the scene new sheets on the bed
we play our roles
reprise in the morning.
you buy me orange juice
isabella fiore
i. i put on winnetka bowling league when we drove across town,
you asked me if i wanted dairy queen,
baby,
i’m lactose intolerant,
but that’s just another thing you didn’t care about,
we stopped anyways,
i shit myself for days after.
ii. seven things i hate about you,
you smell like peach right when you wake up from a nap,
i find your socks strewn all over the apartment,
you drink enough coffee to fuel a small village,
when i clean the bathtub i find your hair in small chunks down the drain,
our cat only loves you,
you have the nicest boobs in the city,
and my biggest mistake is letting you close to me.
iii. my only advantage is that you said you loved me first,
so i could bid my time before i handed those words back,
i did,
like a handful of crushed blackberries,
a metaphor used so many times before,
but it’s true,
sweet, fresh, and real,
everything made sense then,
you took the fruit from me and ate it,
did they taste as good to you as it felt for me?
iv. none of me wants any of you anymore,
except for your voice,
the lilting pentameter of everything you ever said,
nothing came across as a threat,
even though in retrospect,
most things were threatening,
something made me think your lips wouldn’t lie to me,
i wish i wasn’t always wrong.
v. you tried to fix me all the time,
but being broken doesn’t always qualify needing repair.
vi. when you came crumbling down around me,
the apartment felt like the grounds of pompeii,
pieces of both of us scattered on the hardwood like ruins of what used to be,
we used to be so many things,
each other’s favorite person,
past lovers in a different age,
maybe it was too good to be true,
too close for comfort,
no matter how sweet the fruit is,
it spoils in time.
vii. let’s pretend we were back where we started,
when we loved each other.
viii. did you actually love me?
viiii. when you ignore my texts i realize you are over me,
and that is the slowest burn of it all.
writer in the dark
isabella fiore
she told me she didn’t fuck
writers, so i told her i was an
architect instead. she took
me to bed and the next
morning i wrote the first poem
about us.
i guess i am an architect after
all. i am an architect of words,
and feelings, and of telling lies
to my lovers so i can write
about them later.
paint me a picture of me naked,
i asked her one early morning.
show me my body the way you
see it. i want to know what
it looks like when someone
loves me. i want to somehow
learn to love myself.
she called me needy. i mean,
she wasn’t wrong. i don’t need
anyone, i just need everyone. and
then some. i eat approval
for every meal and want to drown
in hugs. i’m a pisces. baby that
is a given.
she’s so vain, i bet she thinks
this poem is about her. it is.
it’s about loving a woman who
loves you without knowing
who you are. it’s about seeing
someone who sees me in a
brighter light that i ever have.
it’s about the push and the pull
and the way passion tastes.
after i finished this, i showed it
to her. i let her read it in front
of me. she was quiet at first.
then she spent the next ten
minutes cursing me out
and pacing around the kitchen.
then she stopped, looked me in
the eye and thanked me.