Happy Valentine’s Day, Santa Cruz: Let’s celebrate with poems of love – and an experiment

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Welcome to a Community Voices experiment. 

We love poetry and want to tap into the richness of Santa Cruz’s literary community by offering a place for poets to showcase their work.  

We celebrate Valentine’s Day week with love poems, three works by local poets, including a UC Santa Cruz student. We picked poems that immerse us in warmth and longing; they remind us of the comfort of abiding love and the wistfulness of seeking it out. 

These poets offer us a quiet moment to think. To connect with our current or past or future selves and reflect.

We know – love can also be terrible. But here – amid the storms of winter and the chaos of constant political headlines – we celebrate loveliness, “kisses like strawberries” and the “different kind of beauty” of love that lasts. 

We didn’t set out to focus on love with such rosiness.  But we issued an open call last month to local poets and these four pieces rose to the top. 

We’d like to expand this experiment, to make poetry and the richness of Santa Cruz’s community of poets a regular feature. Do you think that’s a good idea? Do you have a poem to share? Email Lookout Community Voices editor Jody K. Biehl at jody@lookoutlocal.com. 

If you send work, please include a title and a one-to-three-line biography of the poet. In the subject line, please write: Poetry at Lookout. 

Please submit only original work. We are not discouraging adult themes, but we might not choose submissions that are graphic or explicit. We will accept work that has already been published, but we want to know the details.

We hope you enjoy these little Valentines – and that this is the start of a community poetry adventure together. 

Strawberries 

I often think of your kisses 

like strawberries. 

Not in the cloying taste of chapstick 

Not in the color of your lightly open mouth. 

Just in the gentle curving shape 

of how we fit together. 

For a single moment so perfectly aligned 

as though formed from impressions 

of my teeth. 

As though bitten to make you fit. 

And even when I pull away you 

hold the form of my mouth. 

Likewise I can never discard 

the shape you have given me. 

~ Kai Monahan

Kai Monahan is a UCSC art student focusing on environmental work. He composed this poem while away from his partner on a research trip in Big Sur. The original copy is stained with freshly bitten strawberries from a local farm. 

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Window Frost 

-Newfoundland 

It was our first trip. 

You and I slept curled together 

on the cliff at Cape Spear, 

the wind at your back 

as you kept mine warm. 

Were we in love yet? 

Us with each other, 

both of us with this wild 

and wonderful rocky land? 

Look at the years past, 

what we’ve done together— 

hiked until blistered, picked 

our ways through the thorny parts. 

Now our single paned glass 

rattles loose in a wood frame. 

Last night’s cold snap left it rimed 

with a heavy frost of crystals. 

Have you noticed how we tend 

now to stay closer to home, 

avoid uneven ground, 

choose shorter routes? 

This morning’s sun glazes 

window frost into sheets of ice 

which slide down the glass 

in watery patterns. 

It’s a different kind of beauty, 

this early wintertime. Because, 

even now, we still share a misty 

breath of warmth within. 

~ Lynn De Turk

Lynn DeTurk is a poet who moved to the Santa Cruz area in 2019 and now shares her time between Central Coast California and Tors Cove, Newfoundland. Some of her work has appeared in the Cider Press Review, Mudfish, Poetry North Ireland, the Lost Coast Review  and The Nature of Things. A review was featured in the Prairie Schooner. She holds a master of fine arts degree from Pacific University and teaches in the Santa Cruz County Jail Power of Poetry Project.

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We Dance the Tango 

It was born of lament; 

held in the imagination 

of beats and rhythm, 

those dreams 

that keep you alive 

when you’re caged 

and all that is yours 

is nothing 

but a song on the night air. 

For a few minutes 

your body is yours 

to do as it pleases. 

To press your breast against another, 

feel their heart pound 

and stretch long against their heat. 

To trust another. 

To hold them tight 

as the musicians play— 

a battered violin, a handmade drum 

the lonely bandoneón. 

Shadows flicker 

along the streets of the port. 

A voice calls out 

for another song; 

open, half-turn, promise, dip 

to live this moment, 

to dance, to love. 

~ Kimberley Bermender

Kimberley Bermender teaches poetry, photography and art journaling at Cabrillo College Extension. She founded “Inter|Act,” a popular community spoken word open mic at Satori Arts and also teaches poetry in the jails through Santa Cruz Poetry Project.