Anti-Love Poems
For breakups, heartache, and unrequited love. More “screw Cupid” than “Be mine.”
BY The Editors
Many of us have looked for love in all the wrong places. We have dating apps, deal breakers, love languages, fear of missing out, date-night appointments, long-distance relationships, ghosting, emotional unavailability, conflict issues, couples counseling, fierce independence and co-dependence, not to mention record divorce rates and identity and political divides. Self-help books are a 12 billion-dollar industry that’s growing each year, and we’re all trying to figure it out. This selection of poems show the less idealistic side of love.
The Glass Essay
Anne Carson
Movement Song
Audre Lorde
- Sharon Olds
Love, I'm Done with You
Ross Gay
- BJ Ward
After Eden
Rachel Wetzsteon
Oh God
Michelle Tea
Waiting for This Story to End Before I Begin Another
Jan Heller Levi
A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention
Yehuda Amichai
- Frank O’Hara
ain't that easy
erica lewis
- Jessica Greenbaum
December
Michael Miller
The Darker Sooner
Catherine Wing
You left me – Sire – two Legacies – (713)
Emily Dickinson
- Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
Semele Recycled
Carolyn Kizer
Endless Summer
Nate Pritts
Blues for Almost Forgotten Music
Roxane Beth Johnson
- Kay Ryan
Snowshoe to Otter Creek
Stacie Cassarino
- Reginald Gibbons
History
Aleida Rodríguez
- Tracy K. Smith
Absences
Donald Justice
No Second Troy
William Butler Yeats
As from a Quiver of Arrows
Carl Phillips
- W. S. Di Piero
Anniversary
Louise Glück
- Gwyneth Lewis
I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t
Richard Brautigan
- Billy Collins
The Consolations of Sociobiology
Bill Knott
Sometimes with One I Love
Walt Whitman
Solitary Vice
Valerie Wetlaufer
A Bronze God, or a Letter on Demand
Clifton Gachagua
Nocturnal Admissions
Chip Livingston
Virginity
Anna Swir
Never the Time and the Place
Robert Browning
Poem
Lucy Ives
What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Dear One Absent This Long While
Lisa Olstein
I’ll Open the Window
Anna Swir
I Don't Miss It
Tracy K. Smith
Winter Love
Linda Gregg
The friend
Marge Piercy
Sonnet
Robert Hass
Rain
Kazim Ali
In Golden Gate Park That Day . . .
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing
Robert Duncan
Evening Lounge
Afaa Michael Weaver
- Jill Alexander Essbaum
[Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up
Bernadette Mayer
The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
Anne Sexton
Epithalament
Brenda Shaughnessy
- Marina Tsvetaeva
Modern Love
John Keats
Farewell Love and all thy Laws for ever
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Song: “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more”
William Shakespeare
A Fixed Idea
Amy Lowell
Never give all the Heart
William Butler Yeats
- Franny Choi