The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lisa Cheby’s “Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

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Love Lesson #24 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

all this world’s an open

grave

as love is

open for fallage in by

my unchosen one:

I am God’s promise,

but what of your promise of love?

We toil against gravity all day.

I do not want to wait
to fall
in line

I claw out of the gravity
of your promise

and engrave my own
in earth:     do not surrender

to gravity:

though you lie open

as a grave

sooner or later
that excuse

just stops
working

promises Xander
descended from the Greek
to defend men

who have not fallen in

place: alias: love

is my gravity

keeps me gravely moving graveward
to the hellmouthy gravity of my unreality

(and by grave I mean you)

(and by unreality I mean :

I am the open one
waiting for someone
unwilling to fall.)

—

This selection comes from Lisa Cheby’s Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, available from Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Lisa Cheby is a writer and a librarian in a public high school in Los Angeles, CA. She earned an MFA from Antioch, is an MLIS candidate at San Jose State University, and is the poetry editor for Annotation Nation.   Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Rumpus, Eclipse, The Mom Egg, The Citron Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review and A cappella Zoo and in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Book and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss. Her first book, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

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