Cherry, strawberry, orange: Lucas's poem turns spring into something you can eat. Marked only by three asterisks, it has no title, so its opening words, "cherry lipstick sweet / month of April", do the work of one. The speaker addresses a young lover who seems to be April itself, not yet ripe enough to be May. The poem is about that in-between stage of life and love, and about how a kiss might carry both people from one season into the next.
The beloved is described by what they have not yet become. "You do not know the / strength of kiss," the speaker says, and "you have not grown in to / the month of Mae." Even the weather is unfinished, with "few dayflowers and young before summer's / warmish nightish sunsets." The invented words "warmish" and "nightish" are telling. That -ish suffix hedges, as if nothing has quite arrived: the warmth is partial, the night only approaching. Spring here is a half-measure, and so is the shy, uncertain love it frames. The speaker doesn't seem to mind. The tenderness comes from patience with something still becoming itself.
The poem's key move is to let every sense do the work of taste. "I taste you with fingers, with eyes / and lips" scrambles the senses on purpose, so that touching and looking become forms of eating. The kiss follows: "my pink castles meet yours." Lips as castles is a charming, slightly childlike image, two small kingdoms meeting. Then comes a neat double meaning: "we fall in Spring." Fall is a season, but it is also what people do when they fall in love, and placing it inside spring makes the phrase feel startled and new. Love, personified, "finally understands us," as though it had been waiting to be let in.
Formally, this is free verse with no end-rhyme and no fixed rhythm. Lines stretch and shrink the way breath does. Lowercase letters, commas with no space after them ("April,you"), and colons in place of full stops give the whole thing a spilling, diary-like quality. Sound does the work rhyme might have done. "Strawberry licks" and "tongue sings a duet" are crowded with soft consonants, and later the hush of "quiet landing," "whispers" and "soft blue thoughts" makes the poem physically quieter as it goes. Word-play adds to this. "Re / freshing" is split across a line break, so the reader pauses mid-word, like a breath caught during a kiss, before the flavour arrives. "Orangepurple" fuses two colours into one word, the way two mouths blur together.
The second half moves from the lovers to the world around them. "The sky kisses our heads," "dandelions in our hair," "buttercups tucked behind your ear": nature joins in and decorates the couple like a wedding party made of weeds and wildflowers. These are common, unprecious flowers, which keeps the scene sweet without making it grand. One line holds back, though: "you hold passion between your lips and I can taste it." The passion is contained, offered rather than seized, which suits a beloved who has not yet "grown in."
The ending loops back. "Month of Mae" appears early as something the beloved has not reached, and again in the last line as something their mouth whispers "lovely tunes" for. Judging by that echo, the kiss itself has become the bridge from April to May, a small act of growing up. The spelling "Mae" is also interesting. It looks like a first name, so the month feels like a person being sung to, and the poem's final gesture is a kind of serenade.
What makes the poem worth reading is its commitment to one feeling at its most tentative and sensory. It risks sweetness, and some readers may find the sugar thick, but it earns its warmth through invented words, bent punctuation and a steady shift from taste to sound. It suggests that first love is less a single event than a season of becoming.