Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  We believe that discrimination, social inequality, and injustice are manifestations of our inability to make peace with the body, our own and others. Through information dissemination, personal and social transformation projects and community building, The Body Is Not An Apology fosters global, radical, unapologetic self love which translates to radical human love and action in service toward a more just, equitable and compassionate world.102 Sonya and I got to speak in Oakland on April 16, 2017—Sonya came straight from church, and in the process of letting her in, I locked us out of the apartment I was staying in. The image of her jimmying the lock open in her carnation-pink Sunday best, finding a way, fully in her beauty and power, will forever be the essence of Sonya to me. amb. Sonya, please give me your pleasure bio. Sonya. I have always been drawn to what’s deeper, what’s sticky—I’m a Scorpio. I want to dig in to what can be dug into. There is hedonism in there. I’m driven by desire, pleasure, and passion. And I want to know the underside of it, what it can create. I think that inquiry is what’s created all this uncovering. It’s what began to compel me about poetry and the arts in general. I often say I came out of my mother’s womb with jazz hands. I always loved the immediacy of pleasure in art, having someone experience that moment with you. When I discovered performance poetry, I got to experience that times a million, the pleasure of experiencing language in real time, of communicating that message and having it received in that moment, was super powerful to me. I was like, “oh, what can be done with this? What can we conjure?” I think that the work of language is that it is aiding and abetting us toward what we are supposed to be living into, either by a sense of deep alignment or deep discovery (“I am up against this thing which isn’t true in my everyday”). The Body Is Not an Apology came out of a poem that came out of a conversation with a friend. She was afraid she might be pregnant, and I asked her why she was having unprotected sex with this person she didn’t really care about. She has cerebral palsy and said finding sex wasn’t easy. And I said, “the body is not an apology,” and, oh, there it was between us. She is either going to shift because of it or not, and I was there having spoken these words. I was left with a poem. And it kept illuminating all the ways I was not in alignment with what I was speaking. So I was compelled to get in alignment. I had to figure out what had me still operating like an apology when I was saying otherwise.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben fell to her side and pretended to bleed out of her mouth, her tongue twitching in the dark like a severed lizard tail. The inside of my mouth felt sore, spoken for. It was a lie, letting them believe we could die, but we did it because it was fun to watch them be sorry later. They mourned us by throwing their pellets one by one down the garbage disposal while we rolled over onto our bellies and laughed with all the blood in us. We laughed until we pissed ourselves warm and had to line our underwear with paper towels. I wanted to taste everything native to her. I held her spit in my mouth, wondered if this was what the teacher meant by exchanging bodily fluids. We’d just begun seventh grade sex education, which mostly meant our teacher explained that the adhesive “wings” of a Maxi pad were not literal wings and could not equip us with flight. The teacher told us to develop a platonic relationship with our bodies. On the list of illicit fluids that could be exchanged, bartered: semen, vaginal discharge, blood. But there was nothing about what we’d done. In the animal encyclopedia Ben and I memorized, every hierarchy had a name. Every violence a vocabulary. Somewhere, there was a name for our exchange, in a language that was kept from us. _ I brought Ben to my backyard where the holes breathed, introducing her to each mouth I’d made with my hands. I invented a role for each hole. This one spits watermelon seeds, I said, pointing at the hole to our right. This one tells secrets, I said, pointing to the hole on our left. I still watered the holes once a week with the backyard hose, as if water alone could heal them.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  DAUGHTERBestiary [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] My brother and the other older boys swung their bats at the crows that clotted the sky and clung to the backstop fence. I watched the game every day and walked in circles around the baseball field, measuring the radius of my appetite, daring the sunlight to lash my skin into stripes. My tail would learn like a lightning rod, absorbing the heat of those boys’ hands, and then it would detach into a baseball bat. Belong in my hands as a weapon. Today, one of the crows gripped the side of the batting cage with one foot, its left wing pimpled and pink. Neck plucked clean as my pinky. One of the boys pivoted to swing. The crow shivered and groomed itself, the sun mirrored on its one good wing. Standing on the sidelines, I shouted to warn it away from the fence. But the bat struck too fast and the crow crumpled like a fist, dented the dirt. The boy twirled his bat like a baton and ran a lap around the bases, wiping the blood off on home plate. My tail ticked back and forth across the border of my spine, synced with my pulse, eager to intervene. To bound into the diamond and eat the boys, their severed feet flopping alive in the field, flaccid as fish. The teachers would have to burn the corpses and call my mother, who’d strap me to a pole by my limbs and harvest me for my marrow, distill me to tigerwine. I turned away, willed myself still. When the sky bruised into night, I turned back and saw the crow splayed on its back in the dirt, flat as its shadow. Someone had erected a fence of feathers around the crow, enforcing a perimeter around the body. It was Ben, Ben of the blacktop tarring our knees, Ben of the drought-drugged city, Ben of the monkey bars where she swung like a bell, Ben of the bowl-haircut, Ben of the sun that puckered above us like an asshole. It was the girl from Ningxia, the one who’d come halfway through the year and could spit a watermelon seed so far it skipped the sea and planted in another country. She came out of the batting cage wearing a helmet. In her palm, a perched plum. She bit it to bone, spat the pit at my feet. It was a fossil I’d unbury later, dating it back to today: the birth of my thirst. In her other hand, she held a feather like an unsheathed knife. She had what my mother would call radish ankles, thick-boned and dirt-coated, as if she’d been yanked from the soil in the last hour, birthed into the air by her hair. Beneath my skirt, my tail moved like a compass hand and tautened in her direction. I shut my legs so she wouldn’t see.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I wanted to surf Gaby’s skin with my tongue, stroke her sweat until it lifted from her skin, wings of crystallized salt. Instead, I licked the screen when her face came on, tasted my blood on her teeth. _ I knew a story: In some dynasty, when a father was sick, a daughter cut a piece of her own thigh to stir-fry and feed back to her father. Some daughters even donated their knees. Gegu: to cure what came before you. My father pinched the meat above my knee and said: If I was ever sick, would you give me this? He said he’d need that piece of me. It was the second day he was home and we were in the kitchen. My father spent hours filling the sink and then draining it, scribbling his name on the surface. I told him the water would never remember it. He stepped back, palming his rib cage, pretending to cough out his own fist. I’m dying, he said, performing a wound in his side, and instead of offering my bare calf, I ran from the kitchen and into the living room, left him to paddle around in his own pretend blood. Between my buttocks, my tail burned like a fuse, heat clawing up to the root, a pain pinned to my lower back. I bent forward, hunching until my palms were pressed to the hardwood and I was on all fours, my tail flicking between my legs. I could hear my father in the kitchen behind me, standing with his back to me, and I got to my feet, watched the back of his neck where his veins were alive as snakes. My mother once told me that snakes were the severed fingers of a god who lived on the moon, a god who snipped off her own fingers and littered them on earth as self-punishment for trying to steal the sun. Every snake, I thought, must be roaming for blood, seeking the hand it was severed from. When I looked at my father, my tail unfurled like a whip and patrolled the air, licking my legs forward. It butted between my knees and sang and begged: Fasten my maw to his neck, unspool his veins with my teeth. Bury his hands in the yard for pickpocketing my mother from me. Instead, I considered how best to cook my knees and cure him. His blood may have been made of snakes, but saving him was still my story. When he turned around and saw me kneading my knees, crouching low enough to tongue my shadow off the floor, he smiled and asked if I was praying. Tired-lines gathered in a stanza above his eyebrows. Sweat sheening his skin like an oil spill.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  But then I’d remember yesterday, which was today, which was her mouth making my shoulder lift like a wing. Our brothers took aim, still squinting, unable to tell if there was one body or two. We let them. We were silent when the foam bullets bounced off our thighs and bellies. Ben fell to her side and pretended to bleed out of her mouth, her tongue twitching in the dark like a severed lizard tail. The inside of my mouth felt sore, spoken for. It was a lie, letting them believe we could die, but we did it because it was fun to watch them be sorry later. They mourned us by throwing their pellets one by one down the garbage disposal while we rolled over onto our bellies and laughed with all the blood in us. We laughed until we pissed ourselves warm and had to line our underwear with paper towels. I wanted to taste everything native to her. I held her spit in my mouth, wondered if this was what the teacher meant by exchanging bodily fluids. We’d just begun seventh grade sex education, which mostly meant our teacher explained that the adhesive “wings” of a Maxi pad were not literal wings and could not equip us with flight. The teacher told us to develop a platonic relationship with our bodies. On the list of illicit fluids that could be exchanged, bartered: semen, vaginal discharge, blood. But there was nothing about what we’d done. In the animal encyclopedia Ben and I memorized, every hierarchy had a name. Every violence a vocabulary. Somewhere, there was a name for our exchange, in a language that was kept from us. _ I brought Ben to my backyard where the holes breathed, introducing her to each mouth I’d made with my hands. I invented a role for each hole. This one spits watermelon seeds, I said, pointing at the hole to our right. This one tells secrets, I said, pointing to the hole on our left. I still watered the holes once a week with the backyard hose, as if water alone could heal them. Have you tried feeding them? Ben asked. I said I had, but she said maybe it wasn’t the right kind of prey. Maybe they wanted to hunt for themselves. I told her to forget about them the way I had: I’d learned to live around them, to skirt around the borders of their throats without being swallowed. Ben looked at me, a smudge of mud on her nose-bridge, and said, Every hole corresponds to something missing. We just need to find what’s gone. Whenever there was something she wanted to solve, she fingered the key around her neck, pretended to unlock her mouth with it. She gripped the pendant-key in her teeth and suckled on it, thinking. I slid the key from between her teeth, replaced it with my finger, flinching when I felt her teeth.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Two of Florence’s charity-worker friends, it seemed, were sweethearts: I suppose she must have tipped them off about me, for the next time they came calling, I thought they gazed at me in quite a different sort of way. As for Annie Page: when next I saw her she put her arm about my shoulder and said, ‘Nancy! Florrie tells me you’re a cousin! My dear, I never was less surprised by anything, nor more delighted...’And, for all that my bewildering new interest in Flo was such a troublesome one, it was rather marvellous to feel my lusts all on the rise again - to have my tommish parts all greased and purring, like an engine with a flame set to the coals. I dreamed one night that I was walking in Leicester Square in my old guardsman’s uniform, with my hair clipped military-style and a glove behind the buttons of my trousers (in fact, one of Florence’s gloves: I could never look at it again, without blushing). I had had such dreams before, at Quilter Street - minus the detail of the glove, of course; but this time, when I woke, there was a prickling at my scalp and a tickling at the inside of my thighs that remained insistent, and I fingered my drab little curls and my flowery frock in a kind of disgust. I went, that day, to the Whitechapel Market; and on the way home I found myself lingering at the window of a gentlemen’s outfitters, with my forehead and my fingertips pressing smears of sweat and longing against the glass ...And then I thought, Why not? I went in - perhaps the tailor thought me shopping for my brother - and bought a pair of moleskin trousers, and a set of drawers and a shirt, and a pair of braces and some lace-up boots; then, back at Quilter Street, I knocked on the door of a girl who was known for doing haircuts for a penny and said: ‘Cut it off, cut it all off, quick, before I change my mind!’

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Halfway through the night, we hear chirping. At first I think it’s the sky raining teeth. Ben crawls out of our tent, one hand extended like the sound is a string she can pull on, lure in. I crawl out after her, my arm slipping down the sleeve of a hole. We are beaded with mosquitos, slapping them off each other’s thighs, our hands bright with the blood we’ve stolen back from their bellies. A laced wing is cleaved to the corner of her mouth and I lean forward, lick it off. We scan the sky and the top of the fence, but both are empty. Ben says, Listen, kneeling to the soil. It’s coming from under. The sound comes from beneath our feet, a symphony of the buried. Needling my toes into the soil, I can almost feel the fester of wings. The key around Ben’s neck is the nearest light and I reach for it. A moon docking in the dark of my throat. Reaching up, Ben plucks a strand of sound from the air, follows it back to the ground where it was planted. I hold the hem of her shirt and she steers me toward the 口 where the chirping is clearest, where the sound is ambering inside our mouths. In the center of the yard, I look up and see where our wet roof is angled just right for the moon to catch it and turn it into a mirror, deflecting dawn for as long as we want. Ben kneels and says this is where the 口 begins, where the soil is soft as snot and darker than the night around us. We need to dig them out, Ben says, sharpening her wrists against each other. She places my hand on the ground and I almost feel a pulse, a place to part the soil. We work our hands into the seam-lipped 口, squatting the way we once did when we dug shitholes in her father’s lot, imagining that if we dug deep enough we’d hit water and our shits would float up as islands we’d founded together. Our hands struggle into the soil, grabbing and emptying, adding to the mound at our backs that will soon outgrow us. It’s Ben who meets metal first, three feet below: the silver scalp of a cage-top. It’s her birdcage, the one we fed to the 口, the one she claimed not to mourn. But her hands accelerate, and I know she wants it home in her hands again, rust coating her palms like sugar. We work downward with our fingers, revealing the spine of each bar, the locked door. It’s dented but undigested, with only a few bars missing. We stand now, grinding our heels into the soil to uproot the cage. Ben is panting out a pearled fog. I’m dressed in my sweat. I hunt for my own hands in the dark, find them grasped around hers.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  That week, I stood again at the hem of the hole and begged her to push me in. Do it, I said. Ben wore a bandage around her ribs to make sure the bones clasped back together in the correct place. I’d watched her father cut it from a bedsheet. I spoke with my back to her, waiting for her hands to decide I was right, that I was a species she didn’t recognize. But she never did it. When I turned around, her bandage was undone and whipping the air like a wing. I couldn’t look at her face. Behind her, the sky was blue because I’d bruised it. Her voice had salt in it, a rasp I’d never heard before. The word I wanted was forgiven, but she never said it. I’d dreamed once of yanking the key off her neck, giving her my hands to wear instead. A bruise-necklace around her throat. I knew how to make jewelry of my cruelty. Each of my knuckles was named after an aunt I had never known, and Ben touched each one to her cheek. How many of me she had yet to meet. She knotted herself to the ground, fought her own stillness. The desire to see me hurt was defeated by the desire to not give me what I wanted. When she didn’t push me, it felt more like punishment than forgiveness. She pulled us both away from the hole and into the shade of the shed. Taking my wrists in her hands, I thought for a second she might twist them into wicks, bring me to my knees. I’d worship whatever pain she gave me. I’d be the saint of injury. But instead, she rubbed her lips against my knuckles, soaping them with her tongue. When she leaned forward, mending my lips to hers, I thought of tonguing out all her teeth and keeping them alive in my cheek, seeds of her mouth I could spit out and plant later. Her hand speared down my waistband, wrapped fast around my tail. I tensed, told her to let go. You once told me you didn’t want it, Ben said, twisting my tail until the bone creaked. She said it looked like things had changed: Now I needed it. I could take it from you. Right now, if you wanted me to. I shook my head, afraid if I spoke she’d sprain my tail. I knew it, Ben said, letting go. She laughed. Withdrawing her hand, she wiped it against her shirt hem. You don’t really want to get rid of it. You love it. I asked her what was wrong with that: My tail and I were married at the marrow. I knew now how to wield it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  At night, my mother followed him into the man-made dark of his room—he taped butcher paper on all the windows because perverts could be watching. At night: the sound of her jaw locking up her teeth. That wasn’t the sound I turned my head from: It was the symmetry of my father’s silence, the way sex didn’t sound like two bodies added together but the subtraction of one from the other. At night, I consulted the cookie tin in the closet, my ears magnetized to the toes rattling inside. The toes were butting over territory, acting like they belonged to enemy bodies. I knocked on the lid with my fist and they fired out, bulleting through the lid. One of them flew in and out of my mouth, threading my spit, teasing my teeth to bite it. Before my father came home, my mother spent her nights with me. We watched episodes of Desperate Housewives on the sofa that rose like a loaf of bread when it met our body heat. I dubbed the dialogue in Chinese and my mother spat five-spice peanuts at all the blondes onscreen. I asked her which of the wives she’d want to marry and she said Gaby: She wore cheetah-print, meaning she must be related to Hu Gu Po. A shared history of hunger. At night, my dreams collaged the plots of Desperate Housewives and Hu Gu Po: In this one, Gaby and her landscaper make love in the master bedroom while Gaby’s husband is away at work. But the landscaper’s penis grows a crown of canine teeth when he’s inside her, his palms serrating into paws. Gaby hemorrhages and dies. The landscaper tries to swallow his paws, but it’s too late. Her husband comes home and discovers a tiger pacing his master bedroom, trying to nudge the window open with its muzzle. On the floor is his wife, a lawn mower circling her body, scalping away the carpet. When I recounted this dream to my mother, she deleted every recorded episode. We’d liked Gaby because she was the only wife with our hair. She had the biggest closet, bigger than our bedroom. There was a crack in the TV screen letting the light out of every scene, striping the image onscreen, queering her face into mine. I wanted to surf Gaby’s skin with my tongue, stroke her sweat until it lifted from her skin, wings of crystallized salt. Instead, I licked the screen when her face came on, tasted my blood on her teeth. _ I knew a story: In some dynasty, when a father was sick, a daughter cut a piece of her own thigh to stir-fry and feed back to her father. Some daughters even donated their knees. Gegu: to cure what came before you. My father pinched the meat above my knee and said: If I was ever sick, would you give me this? He said he’d need that piece of me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When we got to the end of the block, Ben squatted to the pavement. She coughed and sand trumpeted out of her mouth, spraying the sidewalk gold. When she stood up, I asked if she’d swallowed sand from the baseball diamond. Laughing, she shook her head and said there was a sandstorm inside her belly, and once in a while the sand passed through her bowels and scoured her insides clean as glass. Ben told me about the weather in which she was fermented: I was conceived during a sandstorm, she said. In Ningxia where she was born, sand formed a pelt over the sky and no one could see for months. They wore wet scarves around their mouths and the sand flayed away their front teeth, their eyelashes. I asked her how she’d known who was who, and Ben answered by closing her eyes and reaching out both arms. We walk like this. She kneaded my cheek, inventing dimples. Her touch could name me better than language. I wanted to say I understood about the sand in her belly: There was also a hunger in me that was more than a body’s. Do you think we’ll get sick, I said, from touching those feathers? In the beginning of the year, when the TV repeated warnings of the Asian bird flu, the teachers had shown up to school wearing face masks with whirring fans. There are so many of you here, we don’t want to get sick. Species could share diseases, they told us, and SARS came from bats and other winged things. When birds and people get too close, they said, one of them gets sick. Ben said she was immune to the bird flu. Her grandmother had died from it and she had been exposed, which meant I was exposed now too. She said I could run away if I wanted to, but instead I stayed and asked her what the symptoms were. It began slow, she told me: First you grew feathers out of your armpits. It would be itchy. Then your lips protruded into a beak and you would only be able to eat sand, seeds, and fingernails. The last symptom was flight. It was safer for your close family members to release you where there was only sky, no telephone wires to get electrocuted on, no windows to mistake for mothers. At a crosswalk, I looked at her before the lights changed. Ben wore her FOB dot on the upper right arm, a vaccine scar the size and shape of my thumbprint. The scar opaled her skin, changing shades depending on the time of day, the season, and where she stood in relation to light.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Phœbe, who had more experience, and to whom such sights were not so new, could not however, be unmoved at so warm a scene; and drawing me away softly from the peeping hole, for fear of being overheard, guided me as the door as possible, all passive and obedient to her least signals. Here was no room either to sit or lie, but making me stand with my back towards the door, she lifted up my petticoats, and with her busy fingers fell to visit and explore that part of me, where I was perfectly sick and ready to die with desire; that the bare touch of her finger, in that critical place, had the effect of a fire to a train, and her hand instantly made her sensible to what a pitch I was wound up, and melted by the sight she had thus procured me. Satisfied then with her success, in allaying a heat that would have made me impatient of seeing the continuation of the transactions between our amourous couple, she brought me again to the crevice, so favourable to our curiosity. We had certainly been but a few instants away from it, and yet on our return we saw everything in good forwardness for recommencing the tender hostilities. The young foreigner was sitting down, fronting us, on the coach, with Polly upon one knee, who had her arms round his neck, whilst the extreme whiteness of her skin was not undelightfully contrasted by the smooth glossy brown of her lover’s. But who could count the fierce, unnumbered kisses given and taken? In which I could often discover their mouths were double tongued, and seemed to favour the mutual insertion with the greatest gust and delight. In the meantime, his red-headed champion, that had so lately fled the pit, quelled and abashed, was now recovered to the top of his condition, perked and crested up between Polly’s thighs, who was not wanting, on her part, to coax and keep it in good humour, stroking it, with her head down, and receiving even its velvet tip between the lips of not its proper mouth: whether it was to render it more glib and easy of entrance, I could not tell; but it had such an effect, that the young gentleman seemed by his eyes, that sparkled with more excited lustre, and his inflamed countenance, to receive increase of pleasure. He got up, and taking Polly in his arms, embraced her, and said something too softly for me to hear, leading her withal to the foot of the couch, and taking delight to slap her thighs and posteriors with that stiff sinew of his, which hit them with a spring that he gave it with his hand, and made them resound again, but her about as much as he meant to hurt her, for she seemed to have as frolic a taste as himself.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It, or something similar.‘I liked my house the way it was,’ she said.‘I don’t believe you,’ I replied; and then, when she hesitated, I said - what, I suppose, I had been planning to say to her, all along - ‘Let me stay, Miss Banner! Oh, please let me stay!’She gave me a bewildered look. ‘Miss Astley, I cannot!’‘I could sleep in here, like I did last night. I could clean and cook, like I did today. I could do your washing.’ I was growing more rash and desperate as I spoke. ‘Oh, how I longed to do those things, when I was in the house in St John’s Wood! But that devil I lived with said I must let the servants do it - that it would spoil my hands. But if I stayed here - well, I could look after your little boy while you are at work. I wouldn’t give him laudanum when he cried!’Now Florence’s eyes were wider than ever. ‘Clean and do my washing? Look after Cyril? I’m sure I couldn’t let you do all those things!’‘Why not? I met fifty women in your street today, all doing exactly those things! It’s natural, ain’t it? If I was your wife - or Ralph’s wife, I mean - I should certainly do them then.’Now she folded her arms. ‘In this house, Miss Astley, that’s possibly the very worst argument you could have hit upon.’ As she spoke, however, the front door opened and Ralph appeared. He had an evening paper under one arm, and Cyril under the other.‘My word,’ he said, ‘look at the shine on this step! I am frightened to tread on it.’ He saw me and smiled - ‘Hallo, still here?’ - then he glanced about the room. ‘And look at all this! I haven’t come into the wrong parlour, have I?’Florence stepped across to him to take the baby, then propelled him out towards the kitchen. Here I heard him exclaiming very warmly - first over Annie, and then over the beef and potatoes, and finally over the pineapple. Florence struggled with Cyril for a moment: he was squirming and fractious and about to cry.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She had seemed chaste as a plaster saint to me, once; she had seemed plain. But she was not chaste now - she was marvellously bold and frank and ready; and the boldness made her bonny, made her gleam, like a kind of polish. I could not look at her and not want to touch her. I could not see the shine upon her pink lips, without wanting to step to her and press my mouth to it; I couldn’t look at her hand as it lay limp upon some table-top, or held a pen, or carried a cup, or did any kind of ordinary business, without longing to take it in my own and kiss the knuckles or put my tongue to the palm, or press it to the fork at my trousers. I would stand beside her in a crowded room and feel the hairs lift on my arms - and see her own flesh pimple, and her cheeks grow warm, and know she ached for me, to match my aching; but she would take a dreadful satisfaction, too, in lengthening the visits of her friends — in handing out a second cup of tea, and then a third-and all while I looked on, tortured and damp. ‘You made me wait, for two years and a half,’ she said to me once; I had followed her into the kitchen, and put my shaking arms about her as she lifted a kettle to the stove. ‘It won’t hurt you, to wait an hour till the parlour clears ...’ But when she said a similar thing another night, I touched her through the folds of her skirt until her voice grew weak - and then she led me into the pantry, and put a broom across the door, and we caressed amongst the packets of flour and tins of treacle while the kettle whistled and the kitchen grew woolly with steam, and Annie called out from the parlour, What were we doing? The fact was, we had both gone kissless for so long that, having once begun to kiss again, we could not stop. Our boldness made us marvel. ‘I had you down for one of those terrible grudging girls,’ she said to me one night, a week or two after our visit to the Boy. ‘One of those dry-rub-it-on-the-hip-don’t-touch-me sorts . . .’ ‘Are there such girls?’

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  But every thing must have an end. A motion made by this angelic youth, in the listlessness of goingoff sleep, replaced his shirt and the bed clothes in a posture that shut up that treasury from longer view. I lay down then, and carrying my hands to that part of me in which the objects just seen had begun to raise a mutiny, that prevailed over the smart of them, my fingers now opened themselves an easy passage; but long I had not time to consider the wide difference there, between the maid and the now finished woman, before Charles waked, and turning towards me, kindly enquired how I had rested? and, scarce giving me time to answer, imprinted on my lips one of his burning rapture kisses, which darted a flame to my heart, that from thence radiated to every part of me; and presently, as if he had proudly meant revenge for the survey I had smuggled of all his naked beauties, he spurns off the bed clothes, and trussing up my shift as high as it would go, took his turn to feast his eyes on all the gifts nature had bestowed on my person; his busy hands, too, ranged intemperately over every part of me. The delicious austerity and hardness of my yet unripe budding breasts, the whiteness and firmness of my flesh, the freshness and regularity of my features, the harmony of my limbs, all seemed to confirm him in his satisfaction with his bargain; but when curious to explore the havock he had made in the centre of his over fierce attack, he not only directed his hands there, but with a pillow put under, placed me favourably for his wanton purpose of inspection. Then, who can express the fire his eyes glistened, his hands glowed with! whilst sighs of pleasure, and tender broken exclamations, were all the praises he could utter. By this time his machine, stiffly risen at me, gave me to see it in its highest state and bravery. He feels it himself, seems pleased at its condition, and, smiling loves and graces, seizes one of my hands, and carries it, with gentle compulsion, to this pride of nature, and its richest master piece. I, struggling faintly, could not help feeling what I could not grasp, a column of the whitest ivory, beautifully streaked with blue veins, and carrying, fully un-capt, a head of the liveliest vermilion: no horn could be harder or stiffer; yet no velvet more smooth or delicious to the touch. Presently he guided my hand lower, to that part in which nature, and pleasure keep their stores in concert, so aptly fastened and hung on to the root of their first instrument and minister, that not improperly he might be styled their purse-bearer too: there he made me feel distinctly, through their soft cover, the contents, a pair of roundish balls, that seemed to play within, and elude all pressure, but the tenderest, from without.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I heard Nina Simone sing this song before I had ever really had a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend.127 Or even a proper crush. I loved it the way a child loves things she can’t comprehend—before I knew about sex, commitment, betrayal, cheating, mistresses. It sounded romantic and sophisticated. At that age, I loved serious poetry, New York City and Paris, stamps, and elegance. I romanticized the “other woman’s” independence and allure. I ignored the final verse. In high school, I learned that being the other woman was the worst. The “other women,” I thought, were home-wrecking sluts who could not be trusted. But in my twenties, I was, sometimes, the other woman. I knew, sometimes, what was going on, and I made contorted internal assessments that it was okay.128 I was starved for touch and performing my sexual confidence. I did what I thought was desired and required of me to be a contemporary woman: exercise independence, be sexual, and take what I wanted. There were a lot of reasons for that messiness. I was insecure in my fatness. I was figuring out sex in an America that demands a virgin-whore in perfect balance. I was nonmonogamous but didn’t know yet how to ask for it, let alone practice it. This is the biggest reason I was drawn to the lifestyle of the other woman. In the traditional relationships I’d witnessed, relationships were spaces of obligation and contortion, and what I wanted was romantic and sexual connection. I wanted to feel free to make my own choices, feel great in my body, and get to be exactly myself. Being secondary allowed room to experience connection on my own terms. One of the hardest and most liberating lessons is learning how to be direct with potential new lovers about whether we’re both actually available to have sex. When people cheat, a lot of crucial information is often left unspoken—like what are the agreements and boundaries with their partner, whether they have told their partner about you or have a plan to say anything, or even if they are ever going to tell their partner that they are cheating. I don’t initiate flirtation with someone if I know they are in a partnership. If they do, I’ve learned to ask the questions and honor their boundaries, which includes, sometimes, helping them hold their own boundaries. Another big lesson has been being able to say, without shame, that I really enjoy being a second. You have to be honest with yourself about this or it won’t work. A friend, who also enjoys being a second, helped me name what’s pleasurable. Here are some key features of being second. Second is not necessarily a numeric thing, it’s just being a non-primary lover/partner to someone who is transparent and open with a primary partner/lover.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  of Aristotle: what our minds are identical with are the forms (or “intelligible species”) of earthly things we perceive through our senses. 5. Eckhart, on the contrary, is willing to make the identity of mind and what it knows central to his thought, thus reviving within Christianity a Plotinian belief in the ultimate unity of God and the soul. 6. In contrast to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of deification (see Lecture Eleven, paragraph V.B), for Eckhart, the soul is by nature divine. D. The Birth of the Son of God in the Soul 1. Like many Christian mystics, Eckhart thinks the soul needs to simplify itself: to free itself of the multitude of thoughts, words, and images in order to become pure and simple. 2. This is a Plotinian theme (the ascending soul goes beyond image and form to be united with the simple One above all Forms) which is picked up by Pseudo-Dionysius and thus Christianized. 3. This simplification of the soul, which Eckhart calls its “virginity,” is taken by later Rhineland mystics as the way to experience the underlying unity between soul and God which is always there. 4. But like Mary, the soul is to become a virgin mother: unified with its underlying ground, the soul bears fruit, giving birth to the Son of God in the soul. 5. This birth of the Son of God in the soul is analogous to the eternal begetting of the Son of God in the Trinity, as the two births coincide in the eternal now of God. 6. Another way Eckhart puts this is: the just or righteous person is eternally begotten from divine Justice itself. 7. Hence at a level deeper than the Trinity, the soul is one with the ground of God’s being, while at a level that coincides with the Trinity, the justice or righteousness in the soul is eternally begotten from God. 8. The desire to go deeper than the Trinity clearly means going beyond where Christian orthodoxy wants go. Essential Reading: Eckhart, “Selected Sermons” in Meister Eckhart, pp. 177–208. ©1999 The Teaching Company. 80 Supplemental Reading: Bonaventure, “Whether Whatever is Known by us with Certitude is Known in the Eternal Reasons Themselves.” Copleston, Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 49–57 and 103–110 (on Ockham). Questions to Consider: 1. Which makes more sense to you: that God created the world according to his own will (i.e., however he wanted to) or that the creation followed the pattern of eternal Forms which were always part of him? 2. Do you find the notion of a deep, eternal inner unity between God and the soul attractive? Why or why not? ©1999 The Teaching Company. 81 Lecture Sixteen Protestantism—Problems of Grace

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The book encouraged readers to center desire and freedom over long-term commitment and obligation, which resonated with me. As a child in the 1980s, I only saw the traditional God-approved marriage between a man and a woman and the singular pathway to that marriage: date, declare love with flowers, commit to feel that way forever, get married in a virginal white dress, live together, and raise children. Yet, from early on I wanted something else: I often crushed on multiple people at a time. I focused more on dynamic and romantic physical connections than the escalator toward commitment.118 In the early 1990s, I became aware of pop culture figures who loved more freely. I saw Prince grinding against the air and being in love over and over. And then Madonna and Angelina Jolie made impressions on me because they were seen publicly in relationships with male and female lovers that emphasized sexual desire. I read of Anaïs Nin’s affair with Henry Miller. I even remember a moment of rethinking the conundrum Archie faced while stress-dating both Betty and Veronica. I saw that the women were clearly so different from each other and could serve very different needs for Archie. In my twenties, I experimented with taking lovers, which mostly entailed making a lot of messes—and learning a lot of lessons: People will lie about their availability. Make agreements based on the true nature of the person or people. If spontaneous hookups turn you on, don’t agree to a drawn-out approval process with your partner that you have to follow before flirting or having sex with a new person. Or, if you don’t want a hierarchy, don’t cave to the pressure to call one person your primary partner. It’s hard and necessary to say what you really want in a relationship. I learned that general ho’ing around didn’t work for me because it’s too messy.119 But neither did traditional monogamy, which I tried for about seven years. For a while, I thought that there was a moral or evolutionary superiority to my nonmonogamous worldview: true feminists and anticapitalists had to see that monogamy was about ownership and patriarchy. I thought my lovers would outgrow monogamy if they really loved me. I even asked monogamous partners to read Opening Up, hoping this particular reading assignment would make it possible for me to “keep” them if we just made some adjustments and then added more people.120 That failed. But this happens a lot when people get politicized around something—we become obnoxious, thinking we can look down on those who don’t know or don’t choose our path. We lose sight of nuance and honesty.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It flicked out in the night, upright between my knees. It was honing itself, rubbing against the whetstone of my bedroom wall. Only stilled when I promised to steer it like a spear, tell it who to stitch through. Your ama is baiting us, Ben said. She’s getting ready to bury someone. I said that the holes would tell me what to do, that they were already sirening, an orchestra of mouths warning me. The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes . While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross-legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst. All around us, the holes were full of a bright sound, jingling like a handful of nickels. My tongue slipped into her nostril and a pebble of dried mucus dissolved on my tongue. I knew everything she’d smelled that day: sweat, the soil, me. Ben knelt and kissed my knees. She pulled my pants down as I lay back, soil gathering between the halves of my ass. My hip-bone fit in the bowl of her palm and shone. I sat up and worked her jeans down to her ankles, the waistband of her underwear biting my finger blue. When I bent my head to kiss where the elastic striped her skin, she reached down and nested her fingers in my hair. I wondered if it was possible for a tongue to turn into a fish and swim into the dark of someone, disappearing forever into that ecology of need. Ben gripped my hair, tugged me closer until my face was not my face but a place where she beached, where salt scoured my mouth of its name. I was dew-hungry. I was the sound she made grinding against my chin-bone, the holes rioting beside us, brimming with spit. The moon newly minted in the heat and pressure of our pressed-together bodies.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “Now you understand the supersensual fool! Under the lash of a beautiful woman my senses first realized the meaning of woman. In her fur-jacket she seemed to me like a wrathful queen, and from then on my aunt became the most desirable woman on God’s earth. “My Cato-like austerity, my shyness before woman, was nothing but an excessive feeling for beauty. In my imagination sensuality became a sort of cult. I took an oath to myself that I would not squander its holy wealth upon any ordinary person, but I would reserve it for an ideal woman, if possible for the goddess of love herself. “I went to the university at a very early age. It was in the capital where my aunt lived. My room looked at that time like Doctor Faustus’s. Everything in it was in a wild confusion. There were huge closets stuffed full of books, which I bought for a song from a Jewish dealer on the Servanica;3 there were globes, atlases, flasks, charts of the heavens, skeletons of animals, skulls, the busts of eminent men. It looked as though Mephistopheles might have stepped out from behind the huge green store as a wandering scholiast at any moment. [Footnote 3: The street of the Jews in Lemberg.] “I studied everything in a jumble without system, without selection: chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy, and literature; I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Molière, the Koran, the Kosmos, Casanova’s Memoirs. I grew more confused each day, more fantastical, more supersensual. All the time a beautiful ideal woman hovered in my imagination. Every so and so often she appeared before me like a vision among my leather-bound books and dead bones, lying on a bed of roses, surrounded by cupids. Sometimes she appeared gowned like the Olympians with the stern white face of the plaster Venus; sometimes in braids of a rich brown, blue-eyes, in my aunt’s red velvet kazabaika, trimmed with ermine. “One morning when she had again risen out of the golden mist of my imagination in all her smiling beauty, I went to see Countess Sobol, who received me in a friendly, even cordial manner. She gave me a kiss of welcome, which put all my senses in a turmoil. She was probably about forty years old, but like most well-preserved women of the world, still very attractive. She wore as always her fur-edged jacket. This time it was one of green velvet with brown marten. But nothing of the sternness which had so delighted me the other time was now discernable. “On the contrary, there was so little of cruelty in her that without any more ado she let me adore her.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.24 The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.25 It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.26 This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness. The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered. Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?