Two poems by Olivia Buntaine

Mar 1, 2023 | 2023 Spring - Bodily Autonomy, Privacy, and Choice, 2, Poetry

The Not-Want

To separate from someone
Whom you love
Is an act of patriotism
If they are your country

This is hard to understand but
We have to leave our homes
To grow—at one point or another
Especially if we are planning on returning

You, love, are my country
You are my values, my land, my shelter
Belonging to you fills me with pride
And no matter how far I go from you
I want everyone I encounter to know
That you are where I came from

You are where I came from
Your tongue what I learned to speak
Your landscapes where I first
Looked into the forest and knew
How small and sacred I was

I told you once
When air is all around you
It gets hard to remember
Breathing

I do not want to go far from you
(The not-want is so deep)
But I guess this is learning
To love you
from inside and outside of you


Whatever

I ask God to send me a man I can have sex with
Maybe even one I could love
(holy one, let me experiment with heteronormativity)

And she gives me another gender queer lesbian

Fuck!


Based in New York and Los Angeles, Olivia Buntaine (she/her) works in the worlds of queerness, girlhood, survivorship, and mythology —mostly by writing plays and poems. Catch her at www.oliviabuntaine.com, or her theatre company at www.projectnongenue.org.

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