My Teenage Son Tells Me There’s No Such Thing as Love

(or Maybe It’s Just Overrated)

by Ariana D. Den Bleyker

You know what’s interesting? he says.

You can run your finger through fire

without getting burned but never water

without getting wet. He seeks elements,

symbols, milestones, how to read

smoke signals & flight patterns,

things reaching from the distance.

There are many miles between

flying birds & the ladder he’s descending—

the window I lean from is beyond

what can be seen or reached

without falling forward. He stands

where the landscape ends—

suspended, risen as angel, lofty as star—

levitating, longing. He hovers

above the birds. I fear

dead weight & scattered nest.

I’m slightly above what ripens & falls

in an orchard engulfed by fire.

He’s what burns, slowly dwindling,

feeling thirsty, squeezing his heart

out for what falls away.

I want the man who slides out

from beneath my wings to journey

onward. He says, And what if the poem

about making love isn’t about love,

what if it’s about fucking? If it felt like love,

it was, I say. It’s whatever it wants to be—

sex, love, lust, deliverance.

Love: this territory with no harbor,

no stopping, body with virgin heart.

The blue flesh of sky opens

its mouth for him to hide his grenade.

I tell him to pull the pin—

keep in mind: we all fall once.

* * * * *

"My Teenage Son Tells Me There’s No Such Thing as Love (or Maybe It’s Just Overrated)" is from Ariana D. Den Bleyker's chapbook Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Where Birds Collide with Windows.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York's Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she's not writing, she's spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, fifteen chapbooks, a novelette, and experimental memoir, and two crime novellas. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.