Mildly Erotic Verse

by Rachel Piercey

  He lazed alone inside the cubicle,

  as if snoozing on an altar in a chapel,

  until I hesitated, made my choice.

  I stepped inside and he, by allowing me

  to loosen his towel, strum the hairs on his thigh,

  proved consent by the subtlest degree.

  I’ll do whatever Patrick tells me, try

  a little less tongue tonight, softly

  skim your lips with kisses where we lie.

  EMMA REAY

  Have you imagined having sex with me?

  Have you imagined having sex with me?

  Planned exactly how it would be?

  Have you pictured all the faces?

  The sighs, the eyes, the grimaces?

  Have you schemed how we’d get started?

  Am I flash-naked, legs parted?

  Or maybe there’s some back-story,

  Of brave knights and morning glory?

  Or a plumber, a pizza boy.

  And what am I – coquette or coy?

  Am I Russian? Or am I Thai?

  With skin on thin or fat on thigh?

  Am I a pliable, edible fool?

  Or cougar-clawed, matured and cruel?

  Do I like you? Do you hope I do?

  Do you wish I were more open with you?

  I might be Flora, or Fauna, or Eve, or Dawn,

  Alder Trees, Laurel Leaves, Spider, Swan;

  I am 5 ft. 7, fair, Caucasian;

  Territory vulnerable to invasion;

  I am all states; I am armies campaigning;

  I am trying and taxing and waxing and waning;

  I’m in orbit; I’m a film on repeat;

  I’m Victory, I’m cold, I’m young, I’m defeat.

  I stretch for miles, and if you tried

  To run, like a stream down a mountain’s side,

  More faithful than you meant to be,

  You could run for hours and never leave me.

  ISOBEL DIXON

  Stars, Flowers, Grass and Us

  After our walk in the park at dusk

  I run myself a bath, hold high

  the little vial: three drops of lavender.

  I swirl the oil into a swift ellipse, sweet,

  steaming hot, and think of how the Milky Way

  is swept. What hand stirred that?

  I peel my dress up from my body’s stem,

  a time-lapse blossoming above my head,

  arms raised a moment – praise in church –

  then let the flare of fabric drop, unclip

  my bra, shrug all my trappings off, step in.

  As the water settles to my collarbones,

  small shreds of grass release, float up:

  green secret constellation drifting here

  above my belly, ribs, small watery shadows

  cast upon my skin. Now there’s no doubt

  whose hands it is I’m thinking of.

  HELEN CLARE

  A well-tempered keyboard

  Now that I am finally getting laid again

  my piano playing is improving. What else

  would I do in those moments of waiting

  bathed, perfumed, satinned, variously

  analgised and anaesthetised?

  It seems impossible to me now, that

  anyone could play Bach without thinking

  of sex. More than the insistence of that

  pulsing left hand chord, it’s the way we move

  from key to key as if harmony were a body.

  My fingers are getting nimbler; I can dream

  of grace in those quick passages, almost

  believe that nerves could heal. I’ve noticed too

  that these days sex ends like a chorale, a single

  note slipping into the home chord: a-a-men.

  VICTORIA GATEHOUSE

  Phosphorescence

  Record this you say and I’m left

  in the shallows, holding your phone.

  And I capture it all – the moon

  low and lush as a forbidden fruit,

  you, striking light after light

  as you cross the bay, the way

  your face, as you turn to wave,

  is star-varnished like that of a god.

  Before you upload, before the flurry

  of likes for this phenomenon,

  there’s a moment when your world

  is gleaming in my hands. Tonight

  I would gulp down this blooming ocean

  for a taste of your skin.

  ALAN BUCKLEY

  The Gift

  I knew then, if I hadn’t known before –

  seeing you at that hippie bash in pink,

  drawn to the rolling strut and thrust of your

  tight hipsters, glancing at the strip of skin

  under the shrunk-down tee – how anyone

  might have that shock, as feelings pressure up

  from some persistent spring, thought to be long

  dried out. I squeezed my arms into the hug

  and sensed your breath, its feather on my neck.

  There was no shame. We both knew some things live

  quite happily in shadow, and unsaid,

  their insubstantiality their gift.

  We eyed the women, did the weigh-up talk;

  the way men do, like sparring Bantam cocks.

  IKHDA AYUNING MAHARSI

  Pinkie Minimus

  I asked you to keep the promise

  using your, my Pinkie Minimus,

  like when we were children.

  I hoped that you would keep your promise

  that we made by Pinkie Minimus

  like when we were moppets.

  But what did you do

  but suck my Pinkie Minimus,

  wrestled with worms and germs.

  Yes o yes o

  my Pinkie Minimus

  has been sucked,

  licked by your blunt tongue.

  O no o no no

  what I asked was the promise

  of lost childhood,

  two Pinkie Minimus

  linked to each other.

  Yes o yes o

  we should have put our wedding rings

  on the tiny

  platoon

  Pinkie Minimus.

  RAMONA HERDMAN

  Shave

  The backs of men’s necks

  queue on the Tube.

  Hot breath and the mustn’t

  of reaching to touch. Such

  a little inch of shared air

  to transgress. Sticky dress

  and long haul home to owned skin.

  When I was eighteen,

  my lover asked me to stand over him

  with little buzzing clippers, to stroke

  the hair off with their insect mouth.

  I kissed all up that new tickle

  of conquered skull, triumphant.

  He walked beside me shorn, marked mine.

  My thumb the first to smooth across, enjoy

  the bite of new-cut hair.

  Another summer, older,

  and it’s my father asking.

  Widower, too ill to go out.

  Such uncomfortable trespass,

  shudder and prickle,

  to walk the clippers the way his second wife did,

  cut paths over his small grey head.

  I swept up after. I holstered the clippers

  in the leatherette case and put them away

  in the too-tidy bathroom of his last house.

  There will always be another summer.

  This one, both of us in this dappled, dazzling bath,

  I rest one heel

  then the other

  on your shoulder, lean back

  and trust your razor

  down my leg, nuzzling

  the unseen back of my knee.

  SOPHIA BLACKWELL

  The Globemakers

  We’ve been in bed all day. The winter sun

  has nudged
its pale head at our bedroom window

  but, with no audience, has quickly gone.

  I’m moulding the warm spheres of you, my hands

  softly holding your skull’s stubborn curve,

  ticking with life, all your well-loved lands

  elaborately renamed. Knees, elbows, hips

  become meridian, terrain, equator,

  the plains between them measured by my lips.

  We know the world, its inkblots and crevasses,

  its latitudes. The stars are where we left them.

  We know the streets, their gutters, their sadness,

  but these four hands are artful instruments

  that can remake a world, and these warm sheets

  are full of fallen rivers and lost crescents

  of moon and paper. So we pinch them tight

  between our fingers, paste them into place.

  Something stirs, an extra inch of light

  shimmering closer, ice becoming water,

  something beyond the sea-wall of the night

  that’s vigorous, and sweet, and isn’t winter.

  STEPHANIE GREEN

  My Love, the Shetland Trowie

  After Rabelais

  His eyes are like extinguished lighthouses

  His eyebrows are a gadderie of fiddlers

  His nose a broken sea-arch

  His jaw is like the blue ramp of the ferry lowering

  then clanking shut

  His mouth a hollow gloup

  His teeth smashed Blue Vodka bottles

  His saliva is like the seven tides of Shetland

  His chest hair a scratchy kishie

  His arms whirling wind turbines

  His elbows are like crane-winches

  His legs are posts bristling with barnacles

  His buttocks are half-submerged skerries

  His member is like the seal’s head bobbing up

  and down in the harbour

  His bollocks are ponies’ nose-bags

  His pubic hair is the hay-nets flung

  over plastic rubbish bags

  His arsehole is like the slippery steps down

  to the lower deck

  His piss is the swell in a Force 10 gale

  His sweat is salty houb water

  His oxters are like skories’ nests

  His nipples are the rings of salmon-traps

  His navel is a fire-bucket peppered

  with fag butts

  His skin is like stiff, sea-drenched gaiters

  His breath’s a blow-hole

  His sigh the haar

  His fart is like the flare at Sullom Voe

  Glossary: gadderie – gathering; gloup – collapsed cave;

  haar – sea-mist; houb – salty loch; kishie – woven straw pannier;

  oxter – arm-pit; skorie – adolescent herring gull;

  trow or trowie – Shetland troll.

  HUGH DUNKERLEY

  Hare

  for Bethan

  *

  Snakes that cast your coats for new,

  Chameleons that alter hue,

  Hares that yearly sexes change.

  Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess

  I

  You were surprised by its huge ears

  alert and stiff in the long grass

  its masculine nose

  the lithe terrier-like body.

  We were almost on it

  when the hare erupted into flight

  something more like a deer

  than a rabbit in the way it ran

  bounding in fast surefooted leaps

  across the astonished field

  until it veered suddenly, rose into the air

  and was gone in the dusk of the wood

  leaving only this impression

  warm in the still unravelling grass.

  II

  Warm in the still unravelling sheets

  I run my fingers down your spine

  trace the soft vestigial hair of an animal

  that only minutes ago I held

  bucking in my arms, a fierceness

  I’d never imagined, straining for release

  a changeling that slipped between my fingers

  and was gone with a cry

  now resolving itself back into you.

  VASILIKI ALBEDO BENNU

  Office hour

  in his dim, cluttered room

  and he’s going over the derivation

  of Spearman’s correlation coefficient but I

  am correlating to the coefficient of his ring finger,

  taken by the girth of the wrist flexor packing

  his unbuttoned cuff. I am close

  enough to see the warp

  of his poplin shirt, breathe in the woody

  base note of his aftershave. And now

  a message pops up on his screen, something

  about the tightness of duct tape on

  lips and a whip, and all I can do

  is pretend I didn’t see,

  but I did. But I did.

  NATALIE SHAW

  He liked her to talk about other women’s breasts

  Bridget’s nipples are small and pink,

  tiny strawberries she offers to her baby.

  Eva’s breasts: round like puddings

  whipped and creamy, pale, freckled –

  then Sam, always on display,

  flat as Marie-Antoinette’s

  champagne cups – pop! And then the fizz

  (her head – her head quite gone by then)

  VICTORIA KENNEFICK

  Contagion

  In the lecture theatre, I sit in the dark

  (there will be slides about Visigoths).

  You stroll in: odour of unwashed socks and Lynx

  invades, sticks

  to this plaid shirt which I wear

  in an ironic way, breasts

  push against the check,

  strain blue-flecked buttons.

  You wear a sweater

  big and woolly, with sleeves that go way past your hands –

  if I ever see your hands,

  if I catch one glimpse I will lick them, palm to thumb,

  suck

  each

  finger.

  You sit in front of me, my pupils expand,

  you have a cold, one that needs a tissue –

  a couple of tissues, a full, glorious box, but you don’t have any,

  you messy thing.

  You use your sleeves, you use your

  sleeves, you sneeze and I wish I knew your name.

  I mumble ‘Goth Bless you’, hope you’ll hear,

  you run your sweet nose over a loose cuff.

  I wear this plaid shirt

  I want to rip to pieces, let puny buttons fall in surrender,

  as spoils of Visigoth pillage project on the white screen

  in Boole Basement Lecture Theatre One, I want to

  blow

  your

  nose.

  LAURA McKEE

  how we taste

  we once had a map

  and thought we knew

  where to unbury the salty

  and the sweet

  then we discovered

  these buds spread wider

  saliva wets the folds of things

  and pours

  into the whole of our mouths

  and down our throats

  touches nerves in our heads

  teaches our tongues to crave

  JERROLD YAM

  Prize

  Like a swig of medicine, the undressing is easy;

  I watch the sun rehearse over the arena,

  its lonely eye laying mahogany sheets

  on a row of strangers. Then, when it rages

  enough for a change, I slip

  soundlessly in the pool, legs

  pivoting for the kick-off, as if recalling the force with

  which a man enters my quiet chamber. And the sun

  agrees, setting
live wires over a turquoise floor;

  I am drawn to its audacity, its electrical charm

  tamed by water. Later in the changing

  room we would smile, just short of crime, desperation

  stiffening like a drug as we become

  conjoined, at the pelvis, every breath

  also traced with time’s impatient handwriting.

  It ends as it may only end, wrenched

  free to false safety, as if afraid

  of intimacy. I press a finger

  to the slag, to my lips,

  its awkward musk

  stinging like genius. By then

  you would have gone, so sure of

  diving into another life.

  DI SLANEY

  Their letters

  1st May 1610

  Her letter

  is pressed from flour-damp breast to Judas-hand Joanna, hides in spinster folds to pass the Hall, makes its way first to lips then nose, Peter eager for the hard-worked scent of her, his Rose with lush, wide petals and soft sticky buds, last pinched and tipped on Hollyn Hill St George’s Day past, under the crab apple and in sudden view of big John Beale, his face a ruddy fluster, his mouth a sour benediction recocked to testimony after. Her letter brings an intake of delight, a crotch twitch of sweet slickness full remembered, invites him to visit her indoors, her husband Nicholas off to Lincoln at short call, her window open 10 o’clock this night, and she will take him in.

  6th May 1610

  His letter

  travels safe to Bilsthorpe with trusted Thomas, firm downward strokes on stiff white parchment vowing more than she could dream, trapped in this loveless for six cold years, her husband good for canny trade everywhere except in bed, a man of stolid hopes and shuttered heart. His letter teases with dotted i’s and double crossed t’s, flushes hot tongue thoughts of curls and thighs until her forehead pounds, leant hard against the larder door. His letter pleads she risk again, to meet him outside her house tonight when the moon turns away so not to be complicit in their sin. His letter in its supple roll enfolds their last two near escapes and tightens them to nothing, her sweaty fingers toying with the ribbon, willing to believe.