"I Sign a Marriage License with the Moss" by Liza Flum

I Sign a Marriage License with the Moss

Of course, you have sex in a puddle 
on this worn stone: your sperm travels 
to an egg flung from a wet velvet mass 
of more moss. But you’re also asexual by choice;
you make more of yourself by breaking 
off new shoots. Though I won’t get to choose, 
I hope you fuck your way across my name
in the graveyard, as I did once, parked 
in an oak’s shade by Chapel of the Chimes
as Billie Holiday sang, love is just like a faucet. 
Now, I barely think of that boy, but the view 
of Oakland past the graves was lichen-blue. 
Beyond our car, deer bounded in pairs 
over the headstones, as if death 
were no impediment, just a hurdle to vault.
I was seventeen and most of my life
felt like nothing, 
but I wrote with a pen pressed so hard 
it scored the coming page with white words
like names on graves, ground down
to unreadable limestone divots.
I know I will have a death certificate
without my beloved named on it. 
She and I will be “strangers in death,” bound
by our un-inked vows. Moss, will you 
be my last marriage? When I have no one 
as my spouse, can I have you,
making my name lush, wet, and swollen 
on my stone? I want you 
to retrace my chiseled name with a heavy fist,
bringing letters to life— stay pressed 
on me until you are crisp as pubic hair 
against the hand that tries to brush you away,
when you are thin as dried ink, even when
you are gray flakes across my name. 




Appears in Hover (Omnidawn Publishing, 2025)

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Audio: Liza Flum reads “I Sign a Marriage License with the Moss”

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Photo Credit: Quinlan Corbett

Liza Flum is the author of Hover (Omnidawn Publishing), a 2026 Lambda Award finalist in Bi Poetry and the winner of the 2026 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Narrative, Meridian, Washington Square Review, Lambda Literary, and Zócalo Public Square. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming artist grant, and her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She lives with her family in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

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