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.
via contributormagazine.com
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“Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?”
by Marilyn Hacker
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photo by dwam for suicidegirls.com
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
via fhotobuzzphotography
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)
via crashpadseries.com
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*
via crashpadseries.com
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
via comingbackfromthedead.tumblr.com
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
started crying at “it’s on but/ i don’t know.” haven’t stopped.
Loved every single one of them. :)
“it’s on but i don’t know whether i want to be her, fuck her or borrow her clothes.”
I’ve never heard of Daphne Gottlieb but this is fantastic and I suddenly feel the overwhelming urge to read everything she’s ever written.
THIS.
I really like these, and the pics are wonderfully hot.
this whole fix is pure poetry.
It’s ten days before my birthday and this is the best early gift ever. Thank you Autostraddle, you’ve made my sunday.
You had me at Aphra Behn. <3
yessssss aphra behn. she makes the 1600s hot…because all those stuffy guys in wigs certainly don’t
Beautiful. Thank you.
“it’s on but
i don’t know
whether i want
to be
her, fuck her
or borrow
her clothes.”
That really explains so much so perfectly.
i really liked this
What was my life before “Dear Andrea?” I don’t even know. One big hetero-normative haze.
As a poet I have many feelings about this post. First, I love all of these works, they are beautiful. Second, I’m looking to be published and therefore am slightly jealous. Third, if I have a related poem, can I share it here?
Maybe my favorite NSFW Sunday ever. And that’s saying something.
Amazing. Thank you Autostraddle.
“Love Poem to a Butch Woman” is my favorite. I can relate to the message becuase it’s almost exactly what I want to say to my wife when we have those moments that do not require words. I’ve ruined many moments like this by talking too much becuase I was trying to express how i feel about her, our relationship and our lives together. But Im sure if I recited this to her, she’d finally understand and may even let me speak!
I Love being in love!
this comment gives me warm fuzzies. i love that you are in love :3
<3
Autostraddle, tu connais bien le coeur.
Really, really liked the Eloise Klein Healy one. “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” is a true feeling.
Agreed. Plus I just wanna play softball!
But also I do understand that feeling. I love looking at old pics and seeing what her life was like before me. I ask her mom a lot of questions too! Shh dont tell anyone…
pure poetry week 4eva
srsly
love this post. can pure poetry week just be, like, a regular thing?
My only poetic contribution to this is:
asdfghjkl;;;;;;
That’s was beautiful. And the poems were nice too..
Pure Poetry week every week, please.
Also, Eileen Myles is made of win.
adding to the choir of voices asking for pure poetry week to be every week. so lovely.
i would really like a collection of poetry that was as powerful as this
Oddly enough, I was discussing this earlier last week with a friend of mine – Kudos for including Audre Lorde, though my favorite poem by her is “On the Night of The Full Moon”, since if anyone can handle moon metaphors, its lesbians.
Incidentally, that poem also features one of my favorite lines of anything ever:
“Darkly risen
the moon speaks
my eyes
judging your roundness
delightful.”