Queer Love Poems
Love is love poetry, by and for LGBTQ+ folks.
Love, like identity, takes all shapes, forms, themes, and patterns. Perhaps for no other community is love more self-defining and confining than the queer community. However, like a term or a category, love is never one-size-fits-all: love can be a garden on the moon, a jar of peanut butter, the slug sublime, or just one happy night. Here is a selection of poems written from and about LGBTQ+ love, passion, sex, loss, and desire.
For more poems about love, explore our archive.
A Glimpse
Walt Whitman
i love you to the moon &
Chen Chen
Poem for My Love
June Jordan
Domestic
Carl Phillips
The Hug
Thom Gunn
What Kind of Times Are These
Adrienne Rich
Winter
Timothy Liu
Asking About You
Eloise Klein Healy
Thaw
TC Tolbert
Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
William Shakespeare
- Jack Spicer
From the magazine:
A Second Train Song for Gary
In Trust
Thom Gunn
Valentine
Donald Britton
Proportion Surviving
Renee Gladman
When I Heard at the Close of the Day
Walt Whitman
You, Therefore
Reginald Shepherd
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
William Shakespeare
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe
A Birthday
Christina Rossetti
Power in Silence
Michael Field
One Girl
Sappho
- Amy Lowell
From the magazine:
A Lady
Accidents of Birth
William Meredith
- Peter Pereira
From the magazine:
Turbidophilia
American Wedding
Essex Hemphill
A Poem for the Old Man
John Wieners
Epithalamium
Phillip B. Williams
Voyages
Hart Crane
[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]
Marilyn Hacker
Peanut Butter
Eileen Myles
Love Poem to a Butch Woman
Deborah A. Miranda
Recreation
Audre Lorde
Mayakovsky
Frank O’Hara
- Jennifer Chang
From the magazine:
Conversation with Slugs and Sarah
- D. A. Powell
From the magazine:
Pupil
- Destiny O. Birdsong
From the magazine:
what lesbian porn has done for me
You Love, You Wonder
Brenda Shaughnessy
Dreaming of Lesbos
Tatiana de la Tierra
Six Sonnets: Crossing the West
Janice Gould
- sam sax
From the magazine:
James Dean with Pig
A Poem of Love in Eleven Lines
Gerrit Lansing
- Tarfia Faizullah
From the magazine:
Yr Not Exotic, but Once Ya Wanted to Be
The Aureole
Nikky Finney
- Miller Oberman
From the magazine:
On Trans
- Jericho Brown
From the magazine:
Trojan
The Dream
Aphra Behn
Wild nights - Wild nights! (269)
Emily Dickinson
Husky Boys' Dickies
Jill McDonough
- Richie Hofmann
From the magazine:
Breed Me
- D. A. Powell
From the magazine:
The Fluffer Talks of Eternity
- Assotto Saint
From the magazine:
The Language of Dust
Movement Song
Audre Lorde
- Ocean Vuong
From the magazine:
A Little Closer to the Edge
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías
Federico García Lorca
Later
Raymond Luczak
One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
Sonnet 16
Richard Barnfield
Project for a Fainting
Brenda Shaughnessy
Oh God
Michelle Tea
- Frank O’Hara
From the magazine:
Poem ("Instant coffee with...")
Poem for Haruko
June Jordan
- Nomi Stone
From the magazine:
On World-Making
- Luther Hughes
From the magazine:
Tenor
Love and Death
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends
Julian Talamantez Brolaski