By Chloe Mohs

Perhaps it is my own mind
that has labeled love, other,
that yields its only passion for the
object.

Or perhaps, it was Eros,
who made a faulty romantic of me
the day he made lovers,
and swore devotion in my stead
to the intangible and abstract.

Maybe it’s easier to blame Eros,
for the arrow he pierced through my chest,
off the target,
and for its twin stuck somewhere through a painting
where a body is made of
swaths of color and malleable shapes.

Now, instead, this labeled other
relents my devotion to the
indescribable beauty
of the whorl of clouds billowing into each other
and the sound of wind through trees.

Eros the illusive,
who has made a fool of me,
his foggy spirit,
which presses my minds own crooked passion
to the metallic smell of rain reaching soil
and the look of lighting extending across a dark sky.

It was made for me,
the choice of devotion,
before my lungs could expand
and the warmth of sun could caress my face.
Given to the gentle press of my mother’s hands to my cheeks,
or the way birds dive through the air
and call it flying.

Eros is he, the guilty,
who made a faulty romantic of me,
when he shot his arrow of lust off the mark,
so it may sit two inches
to the left of my heart,
where the beats can’t reach.

Now my fingers tap the discordant melody,
and my chest burns in retaliation.
Thus, I relent my attention
to the labeled other.
The love that evades me.

Perhaps the crooked passion
is his gift, or my pride,
to see the world in its simplest beauty
and still feel full.

–

Chloe Mohs is a 21 year old queer writer from Tacoma, Washington. They graduated from Tacoma Community College in 2023. Mohs prefers to keep her cat and plants for company.