In honor of Autostraddle.com’s Pure Poetry Week, NSFW Sunday is getting kinda poetic today. All written-on-the-body like, all tippingthevelvetish. We have poems for you, and we have images, and then, our little lesbian muffins, you can f*ck your partner/self all the way through Daylight Savings Time and queer on ’til morning.
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“Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?”
by Marilyn Hacker
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Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?
Before a face suddenly numinous,
her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate
again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?
Its documented torrents are unloosed
by such events as recently produced
not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,
one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate.
My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,
I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless
—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.
Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,
sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest
of what I want with you that scares me shitless.
Asking About You
by Eloise Klein Healy
Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don’t know about you. Something about the day before that photograph in which you’re standing on your head. I want to know about softball and the team picture. Why are you so little next to the others? Were you younger? Were you small as a girl? What I want most is to have been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and competed against you at the same time.
from the frightening truth about desire
by Daphne Gottlieb
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it’s on but
i don’t know
whether i want
to be
her, fuck her
or borrow
her clothes.
Recreation
by Audre Lorde
Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me.
Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.
Love Poem to a Butch Woman
by Deborah A. Miranda
This is how it is with me:
so strong, I want to draw the egg
from your womb and nourish it in my own.
I want to mother your child made only
of us, of me, you: no borrowed seed
from any man. I want to re-fashion
the matrix of creation, make a human being
from the human love that passes between
our bodies. Sweetheart, this is how it is:
when you emerge from the bedroom
in a clean cotton shirt, sleeves pushed back
over forearms, scented with cologne
from an amber bottle—I want to open
my heart, the brightest aching slit
of my soul, receive your pearl.
I watch your hands, wait for the sign
that means you’ll touch me,
open me, fill me; wait for that moment
when your desire leaps inside me.
The Dream
by Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689)
All trembling in my arms Aminta lay,
Defending of the bliss I strove to take;
Raising my rapture by her kind delay,
Her force so charming was and weak.
The soft resistance did betray the grant,
While I pressed on the heaven of my desires;
Her rising breasts with nimbler motions pant;
Her dying eyes assume new fires.
Now to the height of languishment she grows,
And still her looks new charms put on;
Now the last mystery of Love she knows,
We sigh, and kiss: I waked, and all was done.
‘Twas but a dream, yet by my heart I knew,
Which still was panting, part of it was true:
Oh how I strove the rest to have believed;
Ashamed and angry to be undeceived!
from “Dear Andrea”
by Eileen Myles*
I love you too
don’t fuck up my hair
I can’t believe
you almost fisted me
today.
That was great.
Me in Paradise
by Brenda Shaughnessy
Oh, to be ready for it, unfucked, ever-fucked.
To have only one critical eye that never
divides a flaw from its lesson.
To play without shame. To be a woman
who feels only the pleasure of being used
and who reanimates the user’s
anguished release in a land
for the future to relish, to buy
new tights for, to parade in fishboats.
To scare up hope without fear of hope,
not holding the hole, I will catch
the superbullet in my throat
and feel its astounding force
with admiration. Absorbing its kind
of glory. I must be someone
with very short arms to have lost you,
to be checking the windows
of the pawnshop renting space in my head,
which pounds with all the clarity
of a policeman on my southernmost door.
To wish and not jinx it: to wish
and not fish for it: to wish and forget it.
To ratchet myself up with hot liquid
and find a true surprise.
Prowling the living room for the lightning,
just one more shock,
to bring my slow purity back.
To miss you without being so damn cold
all the time. To hold you without dying otherwise.
To die without losing death as an alternative.
To explode with flesh, without collapse.
To feel sick in my skeleton, in all the serious
confetti of my cells, and know why.
Loving you has made me so scandalously
beautiful. To give myself to everyone but you.
To luck out of you. To make any other mistake.
See Also:
* Queer Love Poems for Valentine’s Day at poetry magazine
* sex advice from poets at nerve.com
* emily gould on eileen myles: “…she is never apologetic, especially for being rapaciously sexual and snobby/bitchy about other poets and artists.”
front page feature graphic image by sophia wallace