I had been planning on ending this series with a poem by Joy Harjo when she was named the 2019 US Poet Laureate. She is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, making her the first member of a Native Nation to be honored with the title.
Here is the poem I initially had in mind. I was going to write something about how the poem anticipates the end of the world, about how queer life could mourn a dying planet while also being uniquely qualified for imagining another way to go on when we can’t go on.
But then on Friday, we faced the news of impending ICE raids, then a personal essay about the sexual assaults that punctuated one woman’s life, including one perpetrated by the president. Neither story was on the front page of the New York Times, if you still check that rag. And then there was the threat of war.
So I decided to write about this poem instead:
This Morning I Pray for My Enemies
And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
I used to think that the worst thing about my enemies is that none of them deserved me. And yet I have woken up at dawn as if my heart told me: today is a new day, a new day to avenge yourself. I’m not ashamed to have survived what they did to me, but I am ashamed to have let them stay in mind without paying rent. And I’m weary of greeting the sun not with gratitude but with anger.
But it’s June, and I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the uses of anger. I’m not nonviolent, as Nina Simone once said, and I do believe that liberation is a struggle. The older I get, the clearer it becomes that anger burns you out if you spend it alone. The world doesn’t revolve around the mind’s individual agonies, but the collective struggles of the heart have a gravitational pull.
Harjo writes that it is the heart that asks who the enemy is, not the mind that obsesses over injustice and throws its telepathic daggers (or maybe that’s just my Libra stellium talking). The heart is open — I’m thinking of the Frank O’Hara poem here — and so it is the heart that can be patient and pause before asking.
The poem leaves open the question of who the enemy is, but we can speculate. “An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.” Let someone who would do you harm close enough and you begin to need them, to obsess over them, to spend more time thinking about them than they think about you. Hello, TERFs, hello SWERFs, hello white women who make bedfellows of cruel white men and who are more than happy to endure a little bit of misogyny for the spoils of white supremacy.
THOSE WHO HATE US DO NOT DESERVE US. The culture we produce for them, the language we give them, our labor as sex workers, domestic workers, our time of day—they do not deserve us. So why pray for your enemies? Have you seen this bon mot? I suppose you could read the poem as saying that you can turn an enemy into a friend by having an open heart. But I don’t find Harjo to be sentimental, nor do I think the poem recommends trying to convince someone the value of your heart when their opening offer is violence. If an enemy is worthy of engagement, then the enemy is someone we can struggle against.
I’ve written about how poems can be prayers. This poem is for waking up to more bad news with the resolve to stay in the struggle for liberation. It is comprised of short lines—recite each one in a slow prayer for keeping our enemies in our minds but not our hearts, so that we do not grow complacent to their threat, even if they offer us an inch of reprieve (as I am writing this, the ICE raids are “postponed”). Any right given can be taken away (an enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend).
If the heart keeps room for our comrades and keeps out enemies, then we can keep asking questions. We stay open, even when our minds are swayed by bitterness and despair, because our queer lives depend on knowing that we don’t have to live like this. We turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
Before we begin, a few biographical facts about the poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), who was known by her initials, H.D.
+ Early adaptor of the bisexual bob
+ Had a problematic college boyfriend who failed to turn her into his muse and who ended up a fascist
+ Wrote a series of roman à clef to make sense of the entanglement of her creative and romantic lives
+ Had one child, one stillborn, and one abortion
+ Started both a throuple and an experimental film journal with her heiress lover
+ Sought out analysis with Freud to help her work through her trauma, confront her fear of the impending second world war, and to understand her bisexuality
This is to say that H.D. was a modern poet in the true sense of the term “modernist:” her newness remains new, her life alive.
When writing about poetry, sometimes biography matters, and sometimes it does not. Elizabeth Bishop didn’t care for her readers to identify her as a lesbian, for example, but it might mean the world for her readers to know, after reading “The Art of Losing,” what it was she stood to lose. To understand June Jordan’s work, on the other hand, one must have a sense of her political commitments and ongoing community engagement.
For H.D., writing was always a form of thinking through, a processing that was both ongoing and alchemical. Her material was her life, but life, for H.D., extended into past lives, into mythology, a palimpsest that showed traces of writing from long ago underneath the newest words. She was fascinated by ancient Egyptian art, Japanese haiku, and classical Greek poetry, especially Sappho. All of these layers of time are embedded in her work.
H.D. sometimes had a fraught relationship with her own bisexuality, feeling pulled towards either lesbianism or heterosexuality rather than feeling her queerness as an integrated whole. Reconciling her bisexuality was a creative project for her, causing writer’s block when she felt at odds with her own desire. Her work explores polarities that don’t always maintain consistency: what is hard melts away, what is austere turns luscious. Consider her early poem, “Oread,” written when she was twenty-eight.
Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
H.D.’s early poems have a crystalline sensuality, glittering and cutting. These poems were part of the Imagist movement, which sought to capture “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Imagist poems are direct, word-pefrect, mellifluous. There is a coolness to them, but in H.D.’s work, this coolness comes from devotion, the appropriate affect when confronting the sacred and mysterious. (Think High Priestess more than the Empress.)
In this poem, an Oread, or a mountain nymph, addresses the sea, and with Sapphic entreatment, calls her closer. The land and the sea: separate elements longing for each other. But the Oread’s desire for the sea blurs the boundary between the two, so that the crest of her waves becomes the pines that form the nymph’s home. The sea is green sometimes, but so are firs, and when they meet, they aren’t separate. The sea reaches “our rocks,” and her green spreads “over us” to “cover us.” When the sea covers the shore, the water and earth overlap for a moment—an erotic ecosystem.
The word “metaphor,” as H.D. would have known, comes from the Greek word to transfer or carry over. H.D. is interested in the erotics of this early process, where the qualities of one thing become the qualities of another. So, here’s the metaphor: the Oread is not confused about whether she wants to be the sea or fuck the sea. The sea fucks her and she is the sea: she is solid and she is wet and she wants her waves on her.
In one of H.D.’s autobiographical novels, HERmione, the pronoun floats around and alights on both women, making it unclear to the protagonist who she is (“Her” is short for her name, Hermione), and who her lover is when she refers to her. Because for however fraught this question of being and having is, the answer is almost always, breathlessly: both.
But where is the body, asks Salt-N-Pepa. It’s the rare question that can be asked both while dissociating and voguing. Sometimes if I catch a glimpse of my face in a window at night, I am certain the reflection I see is of a dead woman, my skull shining through my eyes. My dissociation stems from the usual suspects: illness, gender dissonance, sexual trauma. It can feel like flashbulbs going off, stumbling into bad lighting — where is the body — flash — where — is — the — flash — body?
When my head and my torso are more firmly held together, I also ask this question when reading poetry. Maybe it’s because I’m an air sign, maybe it’s because every day feels like I’m suturing my body to myself like Peter Pan and his shadow, maybe I’m born with it, maybe it’s dysmorphia, but I turn to poetry more often than not asking where is the body in hopes of finding a map. Dickinson wrote that she knew poetry was poetry when she felt like the top of her head came off; I know poetry is poetry when I can say, aha, “there is the body.”
If your experience of being in your body is a mostly traumatic one (and whomst amongst us, etc), I recommend Sappho, and I recommend Marilyn Hacker, to help reconcile yourself to your flesh form. Their poems are about being verklempt, the Yiddish word for being clutched so tight by feelings that they squeeze out of you. If you’re verklempt, you can’t keep your emotions in because if you open your mouth you are more likely to puke than to speak. Here is Marilyn Hacker on the subject:
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?
It’s 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.
In this sonnet, Hacker moves from a gut feeling Sappho described to one shared “in us,” before admitting that it is the speaker’s own affliction. A gut feeling is intuition, sure, but it’s also something that announces HERE is the body, NOW is the body, RIGHT NOW. Deny the body at your own peril. Writing about the body isn’t just writing about desire, as the speaker points out. It’s also writing about need, immediate and often numinous.
This is a poem for when you are so in love that, even though the feeling is as brutally immediate as an attack of lactose intolerance, shame escapes you. You need the other’s body like you need your own, and, if the dysmorphia isn’t hitting too hard, maybe you know theirs like you know your own. Do they drink coffee to stay regular? Do they need to pee twenty times in a row when they get nervous? Do you tell them when you’ve had a particularly impressive shit, and are they thrilled for you? Weather a stomach flu with a lover and you will know if your love is true. There are more ways to relate to someone else’s body than lust, just like there’s more than one way to sweat up your sheets — get sick and stay in bed all day and you’ve got “a swamp to roll in.”
Hacker is Jewish, so she writes about what we Jewesses often endure: breast cancer and, to add insult to injury, lousy stomachs. (Was Sappho also Jewish? I can only speculate.) Critics have generally said two things about the poetry of Marilyn Hacker: she writes about the body, and she is a formalist, writing ghazals, villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets. Her two interests are intertwined. Hacker’s poetry upholds form like a spine keeps a body upright, like skin holds us in. Bodies and forms offer recognizable shapes and organize what’s inside into interdependent systems. When those systems start to fritz, when fluids leak out of you, when cells start to cluster, we see how brittle these bodies are, how permeable their forms.
Hacker writes about desire, yes, but she also writes about bodies that leak, that shatter, that attack themselves. Lust and IBS can overtake you just the same. We queers can be a nervous yet lascivious bunch who know that having an internal map of the city’s bathrooms is crucial for our survival for more than one reason.
This sonnet doesn’t end with a perfectly rhyming couplet (“rest” and “shitless”). But when everything inside of you must come out, it’s rarely tidy. Neither is getting up in them guts! But as Salt-N-Pepa and Sappho and Hacker all remind us, when you do find the body, it is beautiful.
It’s June, it’s June, we’re living, it’s June. Do you feel our powers rising with the heat, our stares lengthening with the daylight, our desires coming on like freak lightening?
One of the many ways that we have been blessed by the goddess is our gift of second sight, our queer clairvoyance. We can see things others can’t, and we have the power to point it out and make it so: GAY. For centuries, the arbitrary power to name has belonged to the straights, but now we are the ones who declare that our nonsense is law. We could give our reasons, and we do have them, but honey, it’s June — gay rights! Iced Coffee? The queer beverage of choice. Telling time? Homophobic. Ocean’s 8? Powerful all-lesbian cast. Bruce Springsteen? Butch icon. Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You? Transmasc who can’t be seen at Club Skunk. The planet Jupiter? Trans ally. And the moon? The moon, darlings, is trans:
The Moon is Trans
The moon is trans.
From this moment forward, the moon is trans.
You don’t get to write about the moon anymore unless you respect that.
You don’t get to talk to the moon anymore unless you use her correct pronouns.
You don’t get to send men to the moon anymore unless their job is
to bow down before her and apologize for the sins of the earth.
She is waiting for you, pulling at you softly,
telling you to shut the fuck up already please.
Scientists theorize the moon was once a part of the earth
that broke off when another planet struck it.
Eve came from Adam’s rib.
Etc.
Do you believe in the power of not listening
to the inside of your own head?
I believe in the power of you not listening
to the inside of your own head.
This is all upside down.
We should be talking about the ways that blood
is similar to the part of outer space between the earth and the moon
but we’re busy drawing it instead.
The moon is often described as dead, though she is very much alive.
The moon has not known the feeling of not wanting to be dead
for any extended period of time
in all of her existence, but
she is not delicate and she is not weak.
She is constantly moving away from you the only way she can.
She never turns her face from you because of what you might do.
She will outlive everything you know.
Poet J. Jennifer Espinoza is not making an argument for why the moon is trans. The moon is trans, and she is letting us know so we can say, ah yes, the moon is trans. Men once went to the moon, and the fact that this summer is the 50th anniversary of a man leaving a flag on her face — during Cancer season, no less — is a sin no amount of palo santo during a super blood wolf moon will clear away. The moon is feminist art, but please, do not say the moon is “female.”
The moon is trans because, as Espinoza points out, the moon is trans. She does so in declarative sentences that slowly break up as the emotion breaks through, as if her strong feeling that the moon is trans has slowly given way, like a tide, to the moon’s own emotion at finally being seen. Like when you know you are about to cry and the feel the tide break behind your eyes and there’s no hiding. Or like blood from a cut surfacing slowly, and then running down your leg. Do not say that these fluids are what makes you a woman unless you mean that blood and tears are governed by the moon, which is trans.
The address of “you” in this poem is almost a counter-apostrophe, meant to ward off the straights rather than to call them near. After the poem pulls feelings to the surface, it uses these feelings to scare the straights straight away, to demand that they compare whatever they call living to what we experience, even when dysmorphia shows a dead face in the mirror.
Heterosexuality does not have a gravitational pull and straights are not the center of the universe. Nor do queer cis women need to be the center of everything. I’m thinking of when TERFy, SWERFy Liz Lemon told queer icon and trans ally Jenna Maroney that the world doesn’t revolve around her, and Jenna rebuked her: “I am too, I’m the moon!”
That is the level of pride I want us on this June. Good thing it’s June all year.
What characterizes lyric poetry is often a ghostly “you” that calls the absent one into presence. Sappho invoking Aphrodite, Bishop lamenting her lost lover, Villarreal calling out for her ancestors — the lyric “you” can bring someone longed for near, if only for the space of a poem. “You” is a slippery subject, called into being by “I.” The power differential between the lyric “I” and “you” is never stable, since they both depend on each other to exist.
Queers are pros at pronouns, perhaps because our boundaries between “I” and “you” can be slippery at times. Processing can be a renegotiation of boundaries or a clarification of what, exactly, you desire, and whether that desire is compatible with theirs. Sometimes, processing is checking in with where “you” and “I” are at: if the identities are distinct and the boundaries respected, or if they slip past one another, talk over one another. Take this poem by June Jordan:
when I or else when you
and I or we
deliberate I lose I
cannot choose if you if
we then near or where
unless I stand as loser
of that losing possibility
that something that I have
or always want more than much
more at
least to have as less and
yes directed by desire
The poem presents a grand mal fight, the kind you have when you near the end, where the fights stop being about anything particular because the stakes are nothing short of your own right to want something. The line breaks are hard to take. They make the poem feel like a fight: not knowing when to stop, talking over one another, losing your thread, gasping for air through tears. There is no punctuation in the poem, just a series of conjunctions stringing together the speaker’s shaky plea.
Try reading the poem out loud and pausing at each line break, then try reading it all in a rush. The poem ends an open affirmation of the one thing the speaker cannot stand to lose: their desire. The particulars aren’t the point when you’re fighting with someone who does not respect your boundaries and sweeps away your self-affirmation (“we / deliberate I lose I”).
This is a poem for the desperation you feel when you need to fight to stand up for yourself, for your own boundaries — and the feeling of sense fleeing from you when it falls on deaf ears.
Above all else, June Jordan fought for freedom of the most radical sort — the freedom to define yourself in your own words. The civil rights she fought for were boundaries that protected marginalized people from violence and neglect wrought by a capitalist state that chokes the chances of black, brown, and low-income children to thrive. When we say “the personal is the political,” we mean that by sharing our personal struggles to define our own boundaries, we can start seeing patterns, and start naming the systemic violences that keep us from our freedom. Our personal problems are not personal failings, but shared injustice.
Fighting isn’t nonviolent; neither is desire. Being ready to stake out your right for your body to exist unbothered, strong and safe, to be able to say yes to what it wants and no to what threatens it, is to demand the right to self-determination. Queer people face an opposition that says our desires and names and pronouns are wrong, that says our bodies do not belong to us. As Jordan wrote in “Poem about My Rights,” “I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name / My name is my own my own my own / and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this / but I can tell you that from now on my resistance / my simple and daily and nightly self-determination / may very well cost you your life.”
June Jordan’s politics were personal, but they were also communal. There was no “I” in her poetry that could not become a “you” in someone else’s hands. She made as much space in her poetry to show what it looked like for someone to respect your boundaries and protect your practice of self-determination as she did for fighting against those who would repress her freedom. “And there are stars, and none of you, to spare,” she writes in “Sunflower Sonnet Number Two,” because “you” might be a capacious category, but we must care for each one.
My grandmother’s vanity had a tin full of coins and an empty perfume bottle that still retained a scent. A pressed pansy, perhaps. A Virgin Mary pendant attached to a paper clip. Drawers that held her journals that I would read when I was older and she had been long gone — ”Well, good things can happen to me, who knew,” she wrote in one. I wish I knew what the good thing was.
I don’t have a vanity, but I do keep an altar. This altar is a kind of vanitas, a gathering of everything beautiful and deathly, to honor the presence of death in life. I hang a painting of Baba Yaga, a vintage postcard of an meteor shower from the Museum of Jurassic Technology; I offer some dried roses, some live ones, some stones, a sea shell, a bouncy ball, a bone, a pink champagne coupe filled with coins, candles that flicker the strongest when I talk to them. My altar reminds me of the I SPY books I used to read with my grandmother.
An important thing to place on your altar is a poem. I’ve written before about how poems can be prayers, or offerings, or spells, whatever represents your practice. Poems are made of highly intentional language, each word chosen carefully to accord with others. Here’w one you can add to your altar, especially if you are using yours to honor your ancestors, or even to speak with them.
“Corpse Flower”
By Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Yesterday, the final petal curled its soft lure into bone.
The flowerhead shed clean, I gathered up your spine
and built you on a dark day. You are still missing
some parts. Each morning, I curl red psalms into the shells
in your chest. I have buried each slow light: cardinal’s yolk, live seawater,
my trenza, a piece of my son’s umbilical cord, and still you don’t return.
A failure fragrant as magic. Ascend the spirit into the design.
My particular chiron: the record that your perfect feet ever graced
this earth. Homing signal adrift among stars, our tender impossible longing.
What have I made of your sacrifice. This bone: it is myself.
In a note to the poem, Villarreal writes that she wanted to evoke the folk altars of her childhood while mourning the loss of presence around the practice: “As the speaker cleans the dead flowers from the altar, she begins to lay the petals into the shape of a spine, building the form of the longed-for dead in the hope that the offering of each significant object’s ‘slow light’ will return the deceased.” Dwelling in the liminality between life and death — egg, saltwater, hair, cord — these objects of enchantment provide a conduit to ancestors desperately needed. Her poem reaches towards the dust of the stars and finds the same materials in her in her bones.
Villarreal is a first-generation Mexican-American, born in the borderlands. She is a poet and a scholar, researching colonial and generational trauma. Her work honors her grandmother, who died of a preventable cervical cancer that disproportionately affects women in the Texas borderlands.
Who is free to die of “natural” causes? Women of color, working class women — our deaths are often state-sanctioned, willed by neglect or cruelty. I think of Audre Lorde, denied the leave she needed from her university job to tend to her health. I think of my grandmother, her lungs filling with dust from the magnet factory where she worked before she died of cancer.
Constructing an altar is often a private practice. This poem captures the loneliness of practicing a ritual without your elders near enough to guide you. Or the loneliness of a flower after its last petal falls off.
But the poem gathers those petals, each one placed on the altar as every word is placed in the poem. The sweetness of a petal curling up to touch itself.
By sharing these poems together, in our scattered but strong queer community, we start gathering what moves us, what we find beautiful. We begin practicing rituals together — magic like it used to be. Villarreal explains, “So many queer people live their entire lives negotiating what their identity is and negotiating their desire, and they live a queer life in private, they live their queer identity in private, but never get to fully embody it.” Even from our most private spaces of prayer and plea, we can start embodying our ancestors who have been taken from us by structural cruelty, only to become our chirons, our wounded healers. As Villarreal concludes, their sacrifices are built in our bones.
Elizabeth Bishop would not have liked to be included on a list of lesbian poets. Or women poets, for that matter — she declined invitations (even from Adrienne Rich) to have her work appear in a collection of women poets. “Why not Men’s Poets in English,” she protested, “Don’t you see how silly it is?”
I admire Bishop for this very reason: her resistance to sentimentality. Along with Rich, she refused to join what she called the “School of Anguish,” her epithet for the Confessional Poets who made art out of the raw materials of personal pain. But unlike Rich, Bishop didn’t retrieve her poetry from watery depths, preferring to keep desire at a calculated distance. There’s an airy chill to her poems, though occasionally she goes electric. Bishop, it goes without saying, was an Aquarius.
Bishop’s biography is filled cohabitation and separation, lost loves and locales. For however much she bristled at identifying as a lesbian, she was, at minimum, a serial U-Hauler. She traveled from Europe to Key West with unfaithful heiress Louise Crane. She lived seventeen years with modernist architect Lota de Macedo Soares, who died by suicide. Leaving Brazil for Harvard, she fell in love again at fifty-nine with the twenty-seven year old Alice Methfessel, who left her, briefly, to marry a man, or perhaps to escape Bishop’s drinking towards death. Before Alice came back to her, she worried the loss like a stone in her palm, and drafted and drafted a poem:
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
The poem itself is chiseled, the cuts going deeper as it goes down. It’s a stone that wants fingertips tracing its grooves, but it cannot feel the touch.
“One Art” is a villanelle, a fixed form of poetry wherein the first and third lines are repeated alternately throughout the poem until they both appear in the last two lines, which you may otherwise recognize from the telly. Her first draft was in free verse, but she must have found that form helped her build boundaries around her despair so that it wouldn’t overwhelm her, or anyone reading. Even in the last two stanzas, when she gets down to losing her lover, her pain needs extra punctuation: a dash to suggest it’s all an afterthought, and two sets of parentheses, one to hold everything she wants to remember of her lover, and another to contain the exigency that commands her to have written the poem to begin with.
Bishop wrote seventeen drafts of this poem, so that’s one hundred and thirty six iterations of master and disaster. The losses pile up in a life, and each time you survive them, you have proven to yourself you can withstand more. Losing’s not too hard to master because you simply go on, until you meet your last disaster.
I think of my girlfriend, an Aquarius. We have an air sign love and are accustomed to losing things: metrocards, keys, favorite shirts, friends, coastlines, our cool. We’re moving in together, and soon I’ll lose an apartment, a neighborhood, the borough I wanted to live in my whole life. I’ve lost, like Elizabeth, lovers that I knew wouldn’t last, cities that I knew weren’t meant to be mine. I’ve comforted myself: “So many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” that line break after “intent” assuring me that it was in them all along to be lost. But it occurs to me that, when I move out, it will be the first time I leave a place with more than I had than when I arrived.
Alice went back to Elizabeth. Losing isn’t our one art. We must write that, too.
The Perfect Queer poem is an eight-week mini-series that pairs a queer poet with a uniquely queer situation. This week Natalie will guide you through Sappho’s illuminating lessons.
Imagine poetry before anyone thought to call the work of men Western civilization, before Plato cast poets out of his Republic, before Penelope waited up for her husband to come home. Imagine the sun on your skin on an isle off the west coast of Turkey, a girl in a diaphanous dress with violets on her lap. Imagine there is no history other than the one you share with this girl.
So much of what we might think of as queer lyric poetry comes is set by Sappho’s example: her attempts to speak her desire so emphatically that it wills love into existence, her drama that always teeters into hyperbole (“I simply want to be dead” as a poem opener), her longing for an absent beloved, the art of recovery reading her work requires.
To read her poetry is to meditate on blank space, since much of her work has been lost to time and exists almost only in fragments. Many of her fragments are only a single word or phrase — “paingiver,” “daring,” “I might go” — that sets the precedent for what poetry, that genre that rests on the knife’s edge of possibility and loss, can offer. When Anne Carson translates Sappho, she leaves in the brackets to “imply a free space of imaginal adventure.” The words the brackets suggest might be missing or illegible, or even just an incompleteness that does not need remedying.
Only one poem of Sappho’s exists in its entirety, “Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind.” The poem is a conversation between Sappho and Aphrodite, whom the poet has supplicated for help in love (now again, the goddess points out). It is a poem for an altar, to be whispered from your most desperate heartspace, when this time, this time, you must have “what I want to happen most of all / in my crazy heart.” Lyric poetry, Sappho’s genre, is set to music. It relies on repetition, a vocalization of desire so insistent it must create the world it wants. Poems like these are prayers, offerings, spells.
We do not have less for the loss of Sappho’s full poems. There is a Sappho fragment for every possible queer scenario:
When she comes first: “You got there first: beautiful”
When you wish you could undo your first time when you were closeted: “do I still yearn for my virginity?”
When you’re not even mad, actually: “but I am not someone who likes to wound / rather I have a quiet mind”
When your queer bff finally meets someone nontoxic: “may you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend”
When she has pulled a Tina: “but you love some man more than me”
When your barista crush calls your name: “girl sweetvoiced”
When some rando male is harassing you on twitter: “whiter by far than an egg”
When you feel yourself dissociating and you’re trying to stay in your body: “ ]anxiety ] ground”
When you’re a Libra sun or moon: “I don’t know what to do / two states of mind in me”
When your grandmother is telling her friends about your relationship: “Leto and Niobe were beloved friends”
When your worst ex swears they’ve changed: “lyre lyre lyre”
But the one I return to most is this simple prayer:
Someone will remember us
I say
even in another time
We don’t know very much about Sappho’s life. She lived on the isle of Lesbos and was exiled to Sicily. She may have had a daughter; she never mentions her father. For as long as there have been scholars, they have argued about Sappho’s lesbianism and her promiscuity. But what I love about this particular fragment is that it doesn’t express a long for her name to be remembered to history. Hers wasn’t a desire for individual glory. What she wanted remembered was “us,” the bond shared between women, of course.
Sometimes, I read the fragment as an echo of another, “as long as you want,” perhaps the sweetest promise you can make a lover. Other times, I read it as a consolation on leaving a lover, as in Fragment 94, where she asks her soon to be ex to remember her, the beautiful times they shared, and reminds her, “and neither any nor any / holy place no / was there from which we were absent.”
Imagine a love so fully present that there is no place, no time, in the history of the world where your love was not known.