Origami Moonlight: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2009-2012

By Paul Hina

Origami Moonlight is Paul Hina's third installment in his continuing Collected Poems series. In this follow-up to Such Deliberate Loveliness (2007) and Of Wanting and Rain(2011), Hina uses his unique, whimsical language to create an impressionistic, labyrinthine landscape of man's desire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Hina
• Release date: Apr 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310653094

Paul Hina

Paul Hina is the author of eight novels including Imeros, Let it Snow, and Double Play. His eighth novel, The Other Shore, was released in March 2016 with the story From the Boathouse in a single volume, The Other Shore: Two Stories of Love and Death. The Lavender Haze: Three Stories of Flirting with an Affair is his most recent release and includes three new stories. Hina has also published four collections of poetry including Such Deliberate Loveliness, Of Wanting and Rain, Origami Moonlight and Music Only We Know. Paul currently lives in Athens, Ohio with his wife, Sarah, and their two children.

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origami moonlight: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2009-2012

Paul Hina

Published by Paul Hina at Smashwords

Copyright ©2015 by Paul Hina

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Table of Contents

Poems 1-10

Poems 11-20

Poems 21-30

Poems 31-40

Poems 41-50

Poems 51-60

Poems 61-70

Poems 71-80

Poems 81-90

Poems 91-100

Poems 101-110

Poems 111-120

Poems 121-130

Poems 131-140

Poems 141-150

Poems 151-160

Poems 161-171

1

the summer girls smell sweeter

than spring with strawberry stains

smeared across their lips, sun

streaks sliding down the silk of

their candy-sweet hair

and the soft soil of their skin

shivers with thoughts of hands

hanging hearts like lanterns over

their bated bodies where sexual

shadows will swing, cutting the

humid air of long, hot nights soaked

in silence and sweat and secrets

that startle a star-scarred sky

into the sweetest seizure of

lemon bursts that mar the

moonlight with the most sour

sensations of a body smothered

in wild strawberries

2

the way you tuck one leg under your

body,

the way your melancholy lips mouth

the words you read,

the way your eyes sparkle with both

absorption and sadness,

the shape of your knees,

the beating heart breathing beneath

the flesh of your ankles,

your hair,

clumsily tied behind your

head like it had been combed out by

flippant fingers,

and, as your hands touch the tips

of your toes in a heartbreakingly feminine

tilt of the body,

i lose my balance,

and when you look up,

you catch my fall by placing your fingers

on your lips,

then i lose my breath,

caught on the cusp of your countless

riddles of kisses

3

to kiss her on the lips would

be to drink from some perfect fountain

of sweetest wine,

and i would get too easily drunk on her

juice,

all abuzz from the weight of her tender,

fermented kisses,

to hear her hair whisper things against

my face would be like the wispiest fingers

carefully mapping out my flesh,

and i might grow dizzy from those tender

tendrils of tickles,

uncertain of the direction my fingers will

take to travel the distance of her thighs

to feel her hands plucking at my heart would

be like vibrations of harp strings softly singing

her all my secrets,

and i would happily hand her every hidden

breath,

be ecstatically breathless from the many trips

we've taken inside one another

4

she chews her words with lips

frantically built for kissing,

she hums songs of secrets inside

her beautiful head, waiting to sing

them softly in his somewhere ears,

her flesh anticipates his flesh, crawls

with shivers of waiting sensations, like

snow were always descending around

her, never quite reaching her hungry

skin,

and she sleeps in these wintery beds

she makes, waiting for his strong, warm

hands to devour her with the sweet, sunny

orangeness he slips over her skin when

she dreams

5

he has poetry on his mind, stained

like strawberries to a kiss,

her lips are red and her cheeks are ablush

with joy and laughter,

and when she tries to settle the child

within her with startles of seriousness,

she coyly crosses her legs,

and he pours poetry on her like warmest

chocolate,

and he devours all those thick drips of words,

unwrecks a wish before it wanes into some

shape of normalcy,

or falls into a plethora of pedestrian questions,

names and pasts

(heartaches hovering over honey and wine)

and he plunders the depths of her with mouthfuls

of strawberries and sentences,

coyly uncrosses her legs

6

the light surrounds me, warms my body,

but blackens her silhouette—swallows

her edges and curves with its bright brilliance,

and the distance between us—like some

elegantly dimming star that i'll strive to

remember—makes me grasp tight to her

body's slender shape, and i'll hang a shine

on the tenderness i've learned simply

by being near her,

and at night, though i reach to touch her

brilliant yellow surround, or to taste its

tantalizing arcs of sparks, i can only know

its echoing sound, its delusion of temperature,

its memory of a shine making mirrors from

the light of the moon, musing on its old