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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.

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

read more about isabella ​fiore in her interview with us here.

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