The Best American Erotic Poems
Page 17
Videotaping shall begin as soon as my search begins. I shall first state the date and time, clearly, and the camera operator shall then enter this information electronically onto the videotape.
The camera operator during your strip search shall be of the same sex you are, unless you request otherwise. This option may not be possible in some areas.
During this search, assuming compliancy, a privacy barrier (e.g., curtain, wall, sheet, screen, door, cardboard, beach towel, piece of wood, office cubicle divider or any other similar barrier preventing visual inspection of the private parts) shall be placed between you and the camera operator. If compliancy is not assured and/or there is the threat of your physical resistance, camera operators are instructed to videotape both you and the officer conducting the search simultaneously to protect against allegations of improper physical interactions, in which case all or partial nudity may be captured on videotape.
The purpose of this search will be stated just before it is to begin. There is some evidence that needs to be obtained. While conducting the search of your body, I shall, when possible, wear gloves. If it is not possible to wear gloves, I shall wash my hands thoroughly before returning to work. Then I shall wash them again.
You will be asked to hand over any hazardous materials before the search begins. Failure to do so could result in hazardous conditions for you and for me.
You will shake your hair vigorously. You will lean forward slightly against a stable countertop or the hood of an official vehicle. I will stand slightly to one side of your body. I will begin to search your hair and your head. I will run my fingers through your hair. If you prefer to run your own fingers through your hair, that’s okay too, and I will watch this.
Next, I will inspect your nasal, ear and mouth cavities, including the crevice behind your ear. You will lift your hair up off your neck. If you have any false teeth, you will need to remove them now.
You will stand with your arms extended, fingers spread. I will unfold your collar, cuffs, sleeves and any other creases found in your clothing. I will squeeze your collar. I will run my hands over your shoulder and down the length of your arms, down to your hands, then back up and into your armpits. I will unbutton your shirt and pay special attention to your armpits, the small of your back, your chest.
You will be taken to a more private area, where you will be asked to remove your bra and lean forward. I will take hold of the center of your bra and shake it. I will instruct you to lift your breasts so that I may inspect under them.
I will descend to your waistband. I will run my hands over it and squeeze it. I will unbuckle you, unbutton you. I will run my hands along your waist and proceed then to the buttocks and legs. Your legs will be slightly apart. I will unzip your pants or skirt. I will be using both hands at this juncture. I will be paying special attention to the seams. As I check each leg, I will check the crotch area. I will run my hand well up into the groin.
I will instruct you to squat down and cough. This will permit me a visual check of your darker areas.
Where possible, I will use tongs or forceps to assist me in difficult-to-reach areas.
Then I will switch to the other side of your body, conditions permitting, and repeat the procedure from step one, methodically and with great care, this time more familiar with the curvature of your body, the nature of its hiding places.
I will proceed as quickly as I’m comfortable, and with sensitivity to the subtle responses I provoke in you. What items I find during the search will be placed in my plastic evidence bag.
We shall begin the search now. The time is midnight.
(2003)
SARAH MANGUSO (BORN 1974)
Reverence
Love not the rider but the old rider,
The ghost in the saddle: Obey that ghost.
A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.
But we are not good horses.
We bolt. We stand still in bad weather.
We rely on things we know are unreliable,
It feels so good just to rely.
We are relied on.
But I don’t know who knows that bad secret.
I don’t see who sits astride my back,
Who cuts my flank so lovingly on our way to the dark mountain.
(2006)
RAVI SHANKAR (BORN 1975)
Lucia
My hair, voluminous from sleeping in
six different positions, redolent with your scent,
helps me recall that last night was indeed real,
that it’s possible for a bedspread to spawn
a watershed in the membrane that keeps us
shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure,
that I didn’t just dream you into being.
You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,
give my hands their one true purpose,
find in my shoulder a groove for your head.
In a clinch, you’re clenched and I’m pinched,
we’re spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched
in a chestnut by a mob of our own making,
only to be resurrected to stage several revivals
that arise from slightest touch to thwart
deep sleep with necessities I never knew
I knew until meeting you a few days
or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.
(2005)
LAURA CRONK (BORN 1977)
From the Other
What is small is smaller, suddenly.
Her shoulder, small, with my hand on it,
her ferociousness is something I can grip.
I am so hungry for anything. Blind.
With her breast on my chest, my blindness
finds its course, surging. She is what I am surging
towards, through, pushing in makes her beauty
fragment, disperse, hover.
Pushing freely now. The resistance
her body makes, it is the resistance
air makes for a wounded flyer.
Won’t she take me in farther?
(2005)
DANIELLE PAFUNDA (BORN 1977)
Courtesy
I took a bite from the wormy part for the cur in my stomach.
My plastic, my porcelain stomach. My lover, he wore a buzzer
in the palm of his heart. A hot rod. My lover was a dry heave.
I pinned my hair for him, with a bat bone. I pinned the page
to the wall of the discount drugstore. An advertisement for tricks.
They put the broads on a broad street and the clinicians above
the drugstore. The deference to the white coat and round eye
of the stethoscope. The chill in my lover’s fingers was a false
negative. A falsie. I took a pint for the first five days and
a pint-point-five for the rest.
I slit my skirt. I slit the turf around my garden bed. I lay it
with torn news and vegetable scraps. I lit my tongue in the slit
of an envelope. A reverse. A recipe inside. My lover wore
chef’s gloves, for fighting the eager meat. For the quick
he cut me.
(2004)
MICHAEL QUATTRONE (BORN 1977)
February
Imagine, if you must, another man;
he’ll imagine me. I’ll touch you
with his foreign hands; you’ll feel he
is sweeter, softer. I’ll feel strange
inside you as a stranger; you will feel
better with another for your lover.
I’ll imagine you, your usual mouth;
your tongue will be unusual between
his different lips. I’ll feel your kiss
as an offense; he’ll punish your
perversity, but I will come
to your defense. Then you will come
to his: that criminal whose fingerprints,
blushing on your breast, resemble mine.
(2006)
Sonnet from the Groin
Crazed with spring all I want to do is fuck, free
these thighs their denim prison, let the rich
scent floating around my neck take a look see
into the under things of a man. (Which
man is a trivial spec.) Oh! To be flying
above a mattress, screaming not with hate
but with throaty mating only trying
for the peak and pinnacle of frolic. Fate
and I have made a bargain: to compel
the most virile to lay me down, discipline
the demon out of my body. Possible
friction, find me I’m not hiding, will become
an electric pink rubber band on command. Womb
you have nothing to do with this! Time to bloom.
(2007)
NOAH MICHELSON (BORN 1978)
Valentine
I love the word fuck, how he grazes
my teeth, scrapes, stabs at my tongue
like a fork, first kiss, valentine red
hatchet, how desperately he wants
out, wishbone lodged in my throat,
werewolf loose in the suburbs, goes
wherever, cold gallon of milk glugging
across the Formica countertop, warm
scissors wandering through sheet metal
or sequined curtains of striated muscle,
is easy to use, aim and fire, operates
without AA batteries or ever suddenly
going soft, how the other words
in the locker room hate him, lone
paddleboat gliding amongst a pack
of unforgivably smug canoes,
icicle pitted against a tray of ice cubes,
cheerfully recruited, frogman overboard
out of my mouth into its next mission,
surefire blades of a ceiling fan spinning
in your swaggering den of blue-sleeved
parakeets.
(2007)
HEATHER CHRISTLE (BORN 1980)
Letter to My Love
Dear lord, you are no backbreaking orchid.
You will give that man your last dollar.
When I meet you, lord, I curtsy, chop and mitigate
the customs, and you, my muff-diving butternut
go whooping through the corridor like it’s the last
day of summer and you’re Mr. Moneybags
reminding us all to tread sloppy water.
Lord, I saw the kettles gather in the stonefields.
I saw the meniscus fall asleep.
When the masons shook their glory
from their bright and feathered hairdos
I turned away, lord, turned to see you
gallop down the highway. Where were you
headed? Even now, a light-year
from that beating, I want to know.
(2005)
RACHEL SHUKERT (BORN 1980)
Subterranean Gnomesick Blues; or, the Gnome Who Whet My Fleshy Tent.
In lands where the waters are clear
And the forests virginal, where the heavens
Are full only of birds and stars—
Before writing a poem about it, I find it helpful to masturbate.
I believe this is also true of camping,
For there is no privacy once you pitch the tent.
Indeed, I had pitched a bonny tent
And my next task soon was clear;
Hastily I had gone off camping
And beard of Zeus! My sainted heavens!
I had completely forgotten to masturbate!
So thus I lay, and, twitching ’neath the stars,
I saw, beneath my eyelids, a host of stars
Of pornographic nature—But ho! A rustling in my tent!
Oh go away! Can’t you see I’m trying to masturbate!
And in the corner, ’twas all too clear
As I raised my fist to curse the heavens—
A gnome stood setting up his gear for camping.
“Sorry to disturb you while you’re… camping, ”
Said he dryly, his gray eyes twinkling stars.
“It seems I am drawn here by the heavens
Here to make my home inside this tent,
For to the nose of a gnome there is nothing more clear
Than the scent of a woman as she masturbates.”
He dropped his tiny drawers to masturbate
And, as he did, I forgot all about camping.
Confused I was, but in sooth, one thing was clear—
This gnome’s cock could threaten all the stars
Of my earlier fantasy; and what good’s a tent
If not to screw a gnome preordained by the heavens?
And so smiled the heavens!
And no longer had I need to masturbate!
And so his red-coned hat tore through my tent!
And so blew up his pouch of things for camping!
For small Gnostic/Gnomic/Paracelsian lovers come to us like stars
And we must take away our fingers to make their entry clear.
No longer can I masturbate unless I think of camping—
What cursed stars, what blasphemous heavens
On a clear night sent a priapic gnome into my tent.
(2004)
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
Contributors were asked to name their favorite work of erotic writing—any genre, any language—and to comment briefly on the choice. Assisted by Jill Baron, David Lehman wrote the notes for the deceased contributors.
Kim Addonizio was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954. Her most recent book of poems is What Is This Thing Called Love (W. W. Norton, 2004).
“I haven’t read much erotica, but I’d have to say that The Story of O made quite an impression. I think the reasons I like it had best remain private. Also, the writing is very vivid.”
Ai was born in Albany, Texas, in 1947. Her most recent book is Dread (W. W. Norton, 2003).
“I don’t really read erotic literature as such. However, I very much enjoyed Eye of the Beholder by Marc Behm, which is described in a New York Times review as a ‘private eye crime novel and psychological suspense story.’ The eroticism came from the main character’s obsession with a woman he was watching and how he came actually to identify with her in the end. I found it appealing that someone could abandon all sense of self in the service of someone else. It seemed both mad and inspired and, I believe, reminded me of the artistic impulse.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973). When the Savannah-born Aiken was eleven, he discovered the bodies of his parents: His physician father had killed the boy’s mother and then himself. At Harvard, Aiken made a lifelong friend in T. S. Eliot, whom he nicknamed “tse-tse,” and in 1924 he edited Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems, which did much to establish her reputation. Exemplifying Aiken’s strengths, “Sea Holly” takes its place in a tradition of landscape poems in which the natural world in its motions and gyrations seems to correspond to the human body. The “meeting of rock with rock,/The mating of rock and rock” is charged with erotic force not (or not just) because “rock” stands metaphorically for “breast” and the shape of a woman emerges from the side of the cliff, “virgin as rock,” but because the waves break on the sand and the wind sprays the air with a fury and in a rhythm suggestive of carnal love.
Sandra Alcosser was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944. Her most recent book is The Blue Vein, 2006 ( livre d’artiste, Brighton Press).
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, wrote Simone Weil. Eros is absolutely unmixed attention: Loren Eisley’s white wings moving inside a Manhattan evening; Colette’s mother’s house; Carl Philips’s Cortege ; Henri Cole’s elephant in Middle Earth ; Severo Sarduy’s Written on the Body ; Michael Ondaatje’s dog paw. Jean Rhys: ‘The earth was like a magnet which pulled me and sometimes I came near it, this identification or annihilation that I longed for.’ Paul Shepherd: ‘hairlessness developed with
the increased sensuousness of human body surface.’ George Seferis: ‘The sea, the mountains that dance motionless; I found them the same in these rippled chitons: water turned into marble around the chests and the sides of headless fragments. I know my whole life won’t be long enough to express what I have been trying to say for so many days now: this union of nature with a simple human body, this worthless thing.’”
Elizabeth Alexander was born in New York City in 1962. Her most recent book of poems is American Sublime (Graywolf, 2005).
“When I was the age of the speaker in the poem, the most important erotic writing to me was certainly Pablo Neruda’s Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada, with ‘Every Day You Play with the Light of the Universe’ being the anthem of a dreamed-of erotic life. I was also very taken with 1970s feminist novels starring sexually emancipated heroines: Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, and a bit later, Audre Lorde’s ‘biomythography,’ Zami.”
A. R. Ammons (1926–2001). Born in North Carolina, Archie Randolph Ammons taught for many years at Cornell University. A maverick talent, grandly ambitious yet capable of whimsy, he understood modern science and brought it to bear in chronicling his encounters with the natural world. Though committed to the particular, Ammons in a philosophical mood can speak about abstractions as though they were living organisms observing rituals of unity and linkage. “The sexual basis of all things rare is really apparent” is the first line of his book-length poem Sphere. “Their Sex Life” is a model of elegance, symmetry, economy, and wit; the word failure can refer to a person or an event, and the placement of top invites us to interpret the two lines as corresponding to a pair of human bodies.