Love Poem by Nick Martino
Poetry Editor Jenn McMahon on today’s poem: Nocturnal bloom manifested in words, Nick Martino’s “Love Poem” stirs up magic because it is like none other by that name I have encountered. Mixing intimate language with visceral imagery of life and death, Martino does not allow us to know what to expect as the lines continue to turn. This is not a love poem concerned with shades of devotion easily witnessed in the daylight. Rather, Martino’s words are preoccupied with obscuring blue-green moonglow, the promise of shatter from a lighter ignited in the dark, and the gradient twilit colors in between. This poem is for those who know what it is to measure love while carefully studying breaths.
Love Poem
You watched your first deer die when you were six.
You watched the slotted eye—light was there and then
gone—but that's not right, is it? Having seen death
open like night-blooming jasmine, the hour of
its unsticking blue and slow?
It's late. Moonlight
waterfalls the plastic blinds. I give you the bottle of Red
Label, you give me the dab rig. You light the nail for me.
Your resin paints my voice shut like a basement window.
It's an evening of gifts: I hate this feeling in my lungs
but I love the name you give to shatter. Yes,
I know you have pills for later, long after I've fallen asleep.
I know I'll wake to check if you're still breathing—
Staring down the dark, breathless for the rising of your chest.
Nick Martino is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee. His debut poetry collection Scrap Book (Alice James Books) won the 2024 Alice James Editors’ Choice Award and will be published in 2026. His poems have been published in Best New Poets, Narrative Magazine, Ninth Letter, The Boston Review, and The Southern Review, among others. An alumnus of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Community of Writers, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where he received the 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in LA.
Find him on Instagram @field_book
You can show your appreciation to this writer by leaving him a tip via Venmo: @Nick-Martino-1
