by David Lehman
Some orgasms can devour you. They are wild animals that need to be civilized. After a minute with such an orgasm, your insides are gnawed by tiny teeth.
In a tearoom in Manhattan, a fortune-teller was reading the lines of a young man’s hand when she saw he would be besieged by admiring women. Each woman would be a musician and would play his body as her preferred instrument. For some he would be a drum. For others, a mandolin. Alas, he had always wanted to be a violin, but fate would have it that he wouldn’t meet the woman who would see him as a violin until he was an old man and had given up on women.
Maybe you are a stranger in your own orgasm. You wander through it, cool and unmoved, feeling like a burglar or a Peeping Tom. You watch yourself, feeling more and more anxious, sweating profusely, fearing you will be caught, someone will know the truth. You are but a voyeur of orgasms.
(1993)
CARL PHILLIPS (BORN 1959)
I See a Man
He has just had sex. I can tell by the way, when he notices his shadow ahead of him, broad, spilling over both curbs to the road he is walking down slowly, most of him wants to stop and, as if remembering, stand briefly at a kind of attention. He has just had sex, it’s unclear with whom. It was a man, it was a woman…it was the air, whose inconveniently wide-apart edges can be all day coming together. There’s this sense in which it can’t matter—sex being, for him, any attempt to fill a space in so there’s no room left, for a while, for what he surely calls a suffering inside him—that much his brow gives away, his mouth too, designed, it seems, for delivering lines like Already, as far into the world as I’ve wanted, I’ve come. He’s thirty, thirty-two— it’s easy, still, to say a thing like that. Write it down, even. Call it a poem.
(1995)
DENISE DUHAMEL (BORN 1961)
House-Sitting
She lies on her girlfriend’s bed looking at the pictures in her girlfriend’s husband’s Playboy. The big artificial breasts like glazed holiday breads on the cover of Family Circle. It’s all the same: the body varnish that glistens women and turkeys, that sells them. This is how she feels about it politically anyway—angry, threatened, misrepresented. But her clit begins rising against her will, like a new tooth through resistant gum, and she hates her body for being aroused, her own skin soft and spread, a dull white finish, poultry before it’s cooked, something no one would want to buy or eat.
She looks at these airbrushed computerized pinups, fleshy robots, pouting like she never sees anyone pout on the street. Even though they are all the same, she likes some of them more than others, their ass cheeks smooth as marbles, forgiving her for her own, lumpy as golf balls. She tries to imagine their personalities, maybe some are smart or funny or clumsy.
She cannot quite dream she is one of them as she lies on those thick quilts, with her girlfriend’s red high heels and her girlfriend’s husband’s denim work shirt. She cannot quite dream that she’s lying above a caption for phone sex: I’m wet, I’m horny, give me a call. And she knows she couldn’t enjoy touching such rubbery slick skin, which looks as though it would be cold and indifferent, like the pages of the magazine itself. What is the proper response of a woman looking at Playboy? Why did she bring it with her to lie on the bed? Is her friend upset with her husband when he does? Why does her whole body blush, her stomach warm—one mouth a little wet, the other a little dry.
She hadn’t looked at a magazine like this since sixth grade, for which anyone would have forgiven her. But now, as a grown woman, why does she touch one of her own breasts, losing, for just a second, her disappointment in its lack of firmness, still looking at the Bunnies—all cupcakes and maraschino cherries—stomachs as flat as Pop-Tarts, their fingernails, little pink wings. She parts the hair that tangles over her vulva. Her orgasm is quick and salty, forgettable as fast food. What she does with the magazine is what she guesses any man does—put it back exactly where it was hidden, then sleep away the guilt, the shame.
(1994)
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER (BORN 1962)
At Seventeen
I want to do it, want to snort and root
and forage in your skin and apertures.
It happens fast. It hits a frantic pitch.
I want to touch touch, suck suck, lick lick
like my kin in the animal kingdom.
Suction noises horrify and thrill me,
forensic evidence of what I’m doing
and doing and doing, pants around
my ankles, wigs in my hair. I am
sweaty and dirty, a little bit bloody,
smell of exactly what I have been
up to, sneak home like the criminal I am,
new memory like a seltzer in my crotch.
(1991)
OLENA KALYTIAK DAVIS (BORN 1963)
Francesca Says More
that maiden thump was book on floor, but
does it really matter who kissed who
first or then who decided to go further?
lower? faster? naturally, we took
turns on top. now here, now there, and up
and down…once it started no one even thought to think to stop.
so, we have holes inside our souls,
but mustn’t we begin by filling others’?
god gave us lips and hands and parts
that cannot possibly be saved for prayer. nor by.
i will not name name, claim fame by how well
or who i fucked or why, it happens all the time.
and it’s you, white pilgrim, whom next galehot seeks.
fuck. we didn’t read again for weeks.
(And More)
(o (l)uxu/orious (p)/(l)ussuria) one can rule
rimini and still not rule (or rim) me. doric, ionic,
phallic: i liked it all. i moaned and wept as i do now,
but it was a joy and a different kind of sorrow:
to see your lover’s eyes when he’s down there. down there
the very root was the very root, and fig was fruit and nut
gelato. down here how it happened can still make me shudder.
sigh.
just how far down, sinner, must you go? whatever pleases you:
follow my tail, my thigh. and: VIDE FICA MIA. eat my furbellowed
heart, tremble at my furbo and my body gone but still beautiful
heart, this life that’s for the birds is saved by rhyming such as our
heart, if you twist my arm just right i’ll lose my mind.
the new style is the old style: from behind.
Francesca Says Too Much
each day i came an infinity of times; it rained and reign
was so complete with every pleasure as if in love i sang.
pity you’re confused: ’twasn’t love, it was sex that dissolved me:
limo was body and mud. and long and shiny
and briny what i polished with my tongue marmo hard and pallina
smooth once whetted i never stopped saying sipa, was always in
position, in the mood, too much was never enough. i kept open
my arms my legs my eyes my lips moving lifted to heaven
my ass my hips. pilgrim, can you picture it? my tits. and it was
all wet. don’t cry. dry your ablutionary tears. no thing now can absolve me:
but i regret it not: i was so alive! o, to again have
someone’s occhi and fingers and penes on in me, to be
licked and sucked and eaten and fucked and debauched.
sigh and sign and eye hungry pilgrim, if only you could have watched.
Francesca Can Too Stop Thinking About Sex, Reflect upon Her Position in Poetry, Write a Real Sonnet.
pilgrim, i did not mean to be so loose
of tongue, so bold in all i loosely told
in my smut so smug, so overly sold.
i did not mean, pilgrim, to traduce.
i apologize, i offer no excuse:
but, poet, though you have right to scold
it w
as highsouled you who made my mouth hold
what it held and tell what it told. a truce,
no, let’s call it an honor. mine is apt,
as far as long sentences go: my vice
in your verse will tempt others to try
and sing: readers, lovers forever rapt
and about to sweetly sigh: paradise!
thank you, poet, for keeping me alive.
(2006)
BETH GYLYS (BORN 1964)
Preference
Some people need a harsher kind of love.
I like the smooth soft wetness of our sex.
I like the gentle easy way we move,
our bodies blending in a fleshy weave,
our lips, torsos, tongues a sensuous mix.
Some people need a harsher kind of love.
One plays the master, the other plays the slave.
They plunge each other’s depths with plastic dicks.
I like him gentle. I like his easy move
against me, desire rising like a wave
that draws us slowly to its crest then breaks.
Some women need a harsher kind of love.
A brutish forceful man is what they crave.
They scream and bite; they claw their lovers’ backs.
I like the gentle, easy way you move,
and taste and touch my skin, without a glove,
or ropes to bind me. How could I relax,
confronted with a harsher kind of love?
I’ll take the gentle, easy way we move.
(1996)
LISA WILLIAMS (BORN 1966)
On Not Using the Word “Cunt” in a Poem
Certainly there’s pressure to perform
in such a way what doesn’t sound so stately
and isn’t safe: Let it be shorn,
the poem’s lush holiness. Let locks be trimmed.
Cut to the chase. How unchaste can you be?
Can I proffer a different kind of tongue,
one that licks nether regions? Can I start
offering words that aren’t courtly or cute
and don’t contain such blanket recanting
of words I use when I am in a wreck
or mad at somebody or being fucked
—those anti-canticles I chant when hurt,
the kind of words I punt when breaking glass
or bumping ceilings? Can I be curt,
not hunt for language so gosh-darned appealing
but pick what’s more intransigent
and less ornate? Or is that just a judgment
ignorance can make—that stealing
the spotlight, showing one can “rough it up”
is really more mere decorativeness,
like the performance of a burlesque romp
by someone who would rather keep her dress?
Is that all poems can do to snatch attention,
use such dim tents of tricks? Let’s nick
this baby in the bud: am I too mendicant
to fluid cadence? Do I serve lip
by thinking a poem is holy, not a hole
to thrust things in, for the very sake of thrusting?
Or do I suit myself for an audience
by shirking my naked voice, or the cliché
of what a woman’s naked utterance
would be, as if just honest women cussed?
Should I be someone who docks elegance
because it’s penal territory,
someone who takes the name of poetry
in vain—who kicks the ass of beauty?
I know we’re all voyeurs, but can’t
you come for me a different way this time
and listen, for one minute, to a poem
that’s not revealing crotch and pay attention?
Is it impossible for me to strut
my stuff without the madonna/whore
dichotomy? Without the flash of tit
-illation, would you give my poem a date?
Or must I count my kind of cunning out?
(2005)
DEBORAH LANDAU (BORN 1967)
August in West Hollywood
All day I watch the neighbor’s boy
paint the side of his house.
He seems to rest so easily on the ladder rungs,
shirtless, lanky-limbed, hips tilting in the sun.
In the morning, I am the house, blueing beneath his brushstrokes,
each rib a shingle, my breasts, windowpanes, my waist,
the broad wood planks flattening beneath his brushstrokes,
my shoulders, shutters, lips and eyelashes fluttering eaves.
By four, I’m the roller brush,
turned and turning in his working hands.
Come dusk, I’m the open pail of paint
beside him on the grass—wide-mouthed, emptied.
The neighbor’s house breathes in its new skin beneath the streetlamp.
It puts its face to the darkness and does not recognize itself.
(2004)
JEFFREY M CDANIEL (BORN 1967)
When a man hasn’t been kissed
When I haven’t been kissed in a long time,
I walk behind well-dressed women
on cold December mornings and shovel
the steamy exhalations pluming from their lips
down my throat with both hands, hoping
a single molecule will cling to my lungs.
I sneak into the ladies’ room of a fancy
restaurant, dig in the trashcan for a napkin
where a woman checked her lipstick,
then go home, light candles, put on Barry White,
and gently press the napkin all over my body.
I think leeches are the most romantic creatures
because all they want to do is kiss. If only
someone invented a kinder, gentler leech,
I’d paint it bright pink and pretend
Winona Ryder’s lips crawled off her face,
up my thigh, and were sucking on my swollen
bicep. When I haven’t been kissed,
I create civil disturbances, then insult
the cops who show up, till one grabs me
by the collar and hurls me against the squad car,
so I can remember, at least for a moment,
what it’s like to be touched.
(2002)
RICHARD SIKEN (BORN 1967)
Little Beast
1
An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.
The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night
is thinking. It’s thinking of love.
It’s thinking of stabbing us to death
and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.
That’s a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone.
Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife
carves the likeness of his lover’s face into the motel wall. I like him
and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought.
2
Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.
I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.
3
History repeats itself. Somebody says this.
History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,
over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
History is a little man in a brown suit
trying to define a room he is outside of.
I know history. There are many names in history
but none of them are ours.
4
He had green eyes,
so I wanted to sleep with him—
green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool—
You could drown in those eyes, I said.
The fact of his pulse,
the way he pulled his body in, out of shy
ness or shame or a desire
not to disturb the air around him.
Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,
the way we look like animals,
his skin barely keeping him inside.
I wanted to take him home
and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his
like a crash test car.
I wanted to be wanted and he was
very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving.
You could drown in those eyes, I said,
so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,
so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.
5
It wasn’t until we were well past the middle of it
that we realized
the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,
far from being subverted,
had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.
Mirrors and shopwindows returned our faces to us,
replete with the tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes
