Sydney Vogl | Poem for Exiting the Honeymoon Stage

Sydney Vogl currently lives and writes in San Francisco. Her chapbook, Crybaby!, was chosen by Chen Chen as the winner of the 2022 Cow Creek Chapbook Prize and published in 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook California Is Going to Hell (Nov 2021, perhappened press). Previously, she won the 2021 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and the 2020 AWP Intro Journals Project. Her work can be found in Iron Horse, Jet Fuel Review, Honey Literary, Booth and more.

Sydney Vogl's Website

Also by Sydney Vogl: Crybaby! Death Bloom In January, My Body Becomes a Graveyard of Want

October 23, 2024

Sydney Vogl

Poem for Exiting the Honeymoon Stage

small stars don’t make a show of death. they shudder into a smudge of burnt orange & their neighbors mostly forget about them. on the night of my twenty-eighth birthday, we were asleep by 9:30. this is how i love to love you: early mornings, eating hashbrowns on a yellow couch, sweating citrus wine. when we quarantined through the new year & i wore the same coffee-stained orange sweats for ten days. each night you made dinner while i wrote poems at the kitchen table, both lost in our own universe of affection. when big stars die, they swell into a supernova, obliterating everything they’ve ever known. i want to hold their faces between my palms & shake them. to say that becoming a black hole used to look romantic to me too. this is not a metaphor where we are the stars. our saturday nights are not an infinite cycle of burning, erupting, collapsing. i am bloated more with water than with light & neither of us believes in soulmates. still, every time i bite my nails, you take my hand from my mouth & press it between your palms. i know somewhere above us, the stars must be dying. i can’t hear anything except my own wounded body, knitting itself back together.

Poem for Exiting the Honeymoon Stage is a love letter to bickering. To no-shower days. To feeling sixteen and irrational and not being able to hide it. It is an ode for the particular feeling in your lungs when someone loves you right past the honeymoon stage. Past the perfume, the flowers, the best behavior. I’m thinking of weary bones settling for the first time in years. I’m thinking of truth; of what is.