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.

Page 219 of 344 · 20 per page

• 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)

  When she took off her baseball helmet, her short hair was glazed to her neck with sweat. Her eyebrows were so straight they hyphenated her forehead, and I wanted to draw a line with my finger to connect them. I did the math: She was 1.5 shades lighter than me and two inches closer to the sun. One of her eyes was single-creased and the other double-creased, what my mother called dragon-phoenix eyes: One eye saw everything farther away than it was, and the other saw everything close-up. I was both far across the field and close enough to be baked by her breath. I wanted to be what she saw of me: many-bodied, standing everywhere like a field, so that at every moment, every step, she arrived at me. Ben squatted in the sand and her skirt rose sunward. I looked at the cursive of hair on her calves, then at my own blank skin. She speared more feathers around the crow’s body. When I asked her what she was trying to do, she said, Keeping the sun out of its wound. I told her it was dead already and she said, 再看一遍. I looked at Ben’s shadow, trying to avoid looking directly at her face, at the four moles traversing up her chin to her lower lip. Around her neck, Ben wore a chain with something silver dangling. The pendant ducked down under the neckline of her shirt, and my eyes kept trying to breach that border. The bird between us was missing feathers, blood moating around it, its heart lying beside its body. I looked for a wound in the crow’s breast, a hole from which the heart had popped out like a button, but there was none. The heart in the sand was the size of my thumb and beating itself blue. I didn’t know a heart could beat outside of its body, but Ben didn’t seem surprised. We watched it pump nothing, its skin crimping, the force of each beat rolling the heart farther away from the body.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I want to uplift another way. If we focused on teaching consent and boundaries instead of trying to scare people away from the most common and natural activity of our species, I think we could make major headway in the effort to turn our collective story from #metoo and #itwasme into #notme, and even #weconsentedanditwasdelicious. The pleasures of consent are multitudinous. Here are some keys to consent-based pleasure. Self-Awareness It is a gift to be in touch with your own desire, to know when you do and don’t want something. For survivors of molestation and assault, it can be really difficult to get in touch with our own desires. We can go along with things because we don’t believe we have a choice, because we want to seem normal, because the depression of survival is isolating and touch can temporarily ease the loneliness, or because we have been misdirected into deep insecurity and think we should be lucky for sexual attention. The first step of consent is tuning into your own desire, being able to feel a distinct yes or no in your system. For me, I had to engage in a period of intentional celibacy, get really still and clear of other people’s attention, in order to hear my own longings. You might be able to get there without that celibacy, but the key is that you can identify and point to three different physical and emotional signals that you are feeling a yes for a potential lover. Signs like quickening breath, flushed face, pressure in the groin, sweat on the palms, tingling up the spine, weakening of the knees, and so much more. This self-awareness will help you navigate giving and receiving consent. Consent Has Levels Consent can cover a lot of ground. It isn’t just about the consent of a certain touch or sexual act. Consent can cover the ground of boundaries and communication: Can we flirt?53 Are you actually available for us to build an intimate connection? Can I send you pictures? Can I take pictures of you? Can I share our connection with others, in public, on social media? Can we fuck? Are you open to ass play? Disclosing sexual history and risk is a part of a consent conversation. For some people, disclosing relationship and parental status can be part of a consent conversation. As I have gotten more in touch with my shifting abilities, I also bring into consent conversations things like, “Can you be careful with my knees? I tore my meniscus a while back, so don’t just throw me around.” Asking for these things helps build a space of trust. Eventually you may get past needing to ask for consent on each of these things because you will have developed a space of trust, where you know consent matters and can be navigated as needed. Asking for Consent

• 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)

  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. Ben shook her head and said, Who inside you am I speaking to? Who? She took a step toward me, standing so close I could see a dried flake of spit on her chin. I licked it without thinking, my tongue flitting across her skin. When she didn’t swat me away, I leaned toward her, traced her jawbone with my lips. Slid my mouth up and down the slope of the bone like playing a harmonica, a song humming out of her. We crab-walked to her bunk bed. No one was home but the light coming in through the window-hole. We took off our shirts and I shut my eyes to the room, my hands on the back her neck. Her tongue towed its heat across my belly. She straddled me, lifting my arms and licking the pits, the black patch of hair where sweat dewed, where I smelled most like myself. We butted mouths, backed up, laughed. I propped myself up on my elbows and kissed along the slant of her rib. Her hands around my breasts like unbroken bread. The key dangled from her neck and hung above me, lowering into my mouth. I took it on my tongue and suckled it, the key’s teeth a copy of my own. When she sat up, the key jerked out of my mouth and caught my upper lip like a fishhook, lancing it open. A key, she said, looking down at me. The key swung between us, gilded with spit and lip-blood. Your tail, Ben said. I think it’s a key. _ Ben and I squatted in my backyard. All holes, she said, just need a key. I tried to follow her, but my mind was still on her mouth. Ben crouched over the one in the center, the 口. Where does this one go? she said, and I said I didn’t know. Like all bodies, they didn’t lead anywhere except inside themselves. She turned her back to the hole and squatted over it like she was taking a shit, demonstrating what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to feed my tail to the hole, to slide it in like a key. I pulled down my pants and dangled my tail in.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  These vampires can smell when it’s time to bed you. They out themselves by doing extravagant things like pulling your tampon out with their teeth, or making you grind bloody poems into their thighs. They love the abundant lubrication of blood and are thrilled to meet the voracious appetite of their moon-time lovers. You may have to redirect their excitement if you aren’t in a sexy mood, which happens for some of us during PMS and the first couple of bloody days. They might even be more into the bloody mess than you’re comfortable with. Because the norm is so anti-blood, even if these team members seem extra, it can be healing and normalizing to experience a lover on Team Bloody Fetish. Team Bloody Skittish These lovers don’t run away from the river of life, but there’s not much enthusiasm for the swim. They might prefer a day-three or day-four period bone, when the whole thing is a bit more under control. With a sweet direct request and a quick shower, you might get them to kiss on your clit for a moment. It’s good to be curious with these lovers, examine the reticence, and see if they have an interest in exploring Team Bloody Awesome. Best case scenario, you can negotiate a period-sex arrangement that doesn’t require either of you to feel uncomfortable or undesirable. Team Bloody Faint14 These lovers would prefer that God had not smote the vagina with an affliction as dire and dramatic as monthly bleeding, even in the name of fertility. They feel they need to be protected from the detritus of unused miracles, sometimes to the point of not touching their bleeding lovers or even going on dates during the week of uterine shedding. If you don’t take it personally, it can be really cute when they get that deer in headlights look when your period starts mid-coitus. They might have specific blood-related trauma or a phobia of blood. You can ask about that. If they don’t, though, this team member should be invited into a learning journey around what periods are and how they work. Many of them have desires programmed by the “period = unclean” narrative that only seems to serve a male-supremacist worldview. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that this whole scale shifts relative to your own comfort with your cycle, blood, cramps, and moods. You might be Team Bloody Awesome in theory but Team Massive Cramps (if you’re regularly in so much pain that period sex seems unthinkable, you might be an unknowing member of Team Fibroids, so talk to your OB-GYN) or Team PMS Hulkmonster in real life.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The bird between us was missing feathers, blood moating around it, its heart lying beside its body. I looked for a wound in the crow’s breast, a hole from which the heart had popped out like a button, but there was none. The heart in the sand was the size of my thumb and beating itself blue. I didn’t know a heart could beat outside of its body, but Ben didn’t seem surprised. We watched it pump nothing, its skin crimping, the force of each beat rolling the heart farther away from the body. Ben kneeled close. I thought she might lick it up from the sand and swallow it. Instead she said, We have to put it back inside. I asked her how: There wasn’t any hole to nudge it into. She said, We’ll feed it back to her. Her fingers were already unhinging the beak. Plucking the heart with my thumb and forefinger, I rolled it between my fingers, a berry of blood, sun-spoiled. Ben told me to hurry up, the bird was open, so I wedged the berry-heart between the blades of its beak. We waited for it to wake. The crow jerked in the sand, gagging once before the heart descended into its dark. Ben cupped it in her hands and walked to the sycamore in front of the trailers where we sat for class. But the bird was trying to open its wings like switchblades, lashing at her hands, and she had to let go before we reached the tree. The crow flew backward, tailfirst instead of headfirst: Ben must have been rewinding the sky like a TV screen, playing its flight in reverse. That was the first day we walked home together. Ben lived on the other limb of the city where there was no landfill, where there were still empty lots and fields for sale. Our city was in a permanent state of puberty, new buildings and schools and parks and landfills peaking like pimples before fading flat again, the streets scarred by their shadows. I didn’t tell her I was south of where I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be home and not on the sidewalk where our shadows touched shoulder-bones. Around her neck, the pendant swung loose and she tucked it back inside her shirt. While she walked, I thought about stealing it, jerking the pendant off its string and sucking it till my mouth silvered. I wanted to own something the same temperature as her skin, a talisman of her touch. Every block I stopped to look at her. She wore the cityscape like a crown, the buildings sprung from her skull.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. Ben shook her head and said, Who inside you am I speaking to? Who? She took a step toward me, standing so close I could see a dried flake of spit on her chin. I licked it without thinking, my tongue flitting across her skin. When she didn’t swat me away, I leaned toward her, traced her jawbone with my lips. Slid my mouth up and down the slope of the bone like playing a harmonica, a song humming out of her. We crab-walked to her bunk bed.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Or “Nan”? “‘Nance”,’ I said. ‘Then I shall call you “Nan” - if I might?’ If she might! I nodded and smiled like an idiot: for the thrill of being addressed by her I would gladly have lost all of my old name, and taken a new one, or gone nameless entirely. So presently it was ‘Well, Nan ... !’ this, and ‘Lord, Nan ... !’ that; and, increasingly, it was ‘Be a love, Nan, and fetch me my stockings ...’ She was still too shy to change her clothes before me, but one night when I arrived I found that she had had a little folding screen set up, and ever afterwards she used to step behind it while we talked, and hand me articles of her suit as she undressed, and have me pass her the pieces of her ladies’ costume from the hook that she had hung them on before the show. I adored being able to serve her like this. I would brush and fold her suit with trembling fingers, and secretly press its various materials - the starched linen of the shirt, the silk of the waistcoat and the stockings, the wool of the jacket and trousers - to my cheek. Each item came to me warm from her body, and with its own particular scent; each seemed charged with a strange kind of power, and tingled or glowed (or so I imagined) beneath my hand. Her petticoats and dresses were cold and did not tingle; but I still blushed to handle them, for I couldn’t help but think of all the soft and secret places they would soon enclose, or brush against, or warm and make moist, once she had donned them. Every time she stepped from behind the screen, clad as a girl, small and slim and shapely, a false plait smothering the lovely, ragged edges of her crop, I had the same sensation: a pang of disappointment and regret that turned instantly to pleasure and to aching love; a desire to touch, to embrace and caress, so strong I had to turn aside or fold my arms for fear that they would fly about her and press her close. At length I grew so handy with her costumes she suggested that I visit her before she went on stage, to help her ready herself for her act, like a proper dresser. She said it with a kind of studied carelessness, as if half-fearful that I might not wish to; she could not have known, I suppose, how dreary the hours were to me, that I must pass away from her ...

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The second time, it was a lover who knew where the water was inside me and didn’t say a word but reached into me with busy fingers, tireless, finding me, bringing me to the surface, inviting my breath with hers, bringing me out. I trusted her touch. I relaxed, I opened. I thought squirting was only possible on my later orgasms in a multi-orgasmic sexual session, that the third orgasm was the gate, after which the water might come. I became voracious, wanting my lovers to continue and continue and continue, insatiable until the water came. Each orgasm brought down defenses, opened me up, brought breadth and width between my thighs. But the pressure of ejaculation, of feeling incomplete without it, began to distort my connection to my lovers, my presence in the moment. Perhaps this was what men feel? With time I realized it wasn’t about orgasmic marathons but about my presence, about my detachment from outcome, about my ability to bring my whole self to the point of contact with a lover or a finger or a toy. About letting my lover know when they are at the mouth of the river, of saying yes (and stay, and harder). I change the bedding, I prepare for oceans, I learn to respect the sea within. Sub-section: Skills for Sex in the #MeToo EraMost of the following pieces emerged in the wake of the latest wave of #metoo storytelling. I wrote these columns to address pleasure in this context and learn how we can begin to deconstruct rape culture through both a pleasure politic and pleasure practices. I feel very underwhelmed by strategies to eliminate sexual attraction, connection, or energy between humans as a way of ending rape culture, because it feels like asking everyone to be less honest about their feelings and complexity, asking everyone to repress some aspect of nature that wants to flow and actually needs healthy boundaries and transparency. The level of harm that still exists after several decades of trying to eliminate sexual tension from professional spaces would suggest that desexualization leads to repression and then toxic outbursts of harm, rather than actually decreasing harm. Part of transformative justice is getting to the root of harm, and so much sexual harm is rooted in sexual shame and repression. Increasing this with punitive frameworks around human connection seems bound to continue or increase resentment and harm. The following pieces acknowledge that many of us, at least during certain phases of our lives, are navigating an ever-shifting landscape of desire. They suggest that we can shift from a rape/punishment culture to a culture of enthusiastic consent and clear, respected boundaries. This series explores the skills all genders need in this navigation—clear conversations, boundaries, flirtation skills, liberated fantasies, and more.

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

  "His intention was to remain hidden till she was fast asleep, and then to get into her bed, and, nolens volens, to pass the night with her. "After waiting there some time in mortal anxiety—for every minute was like an hour to him—he finally saw her come in. "As she did so, she shut and locked the door behind her. His whole frame shook with joy at that slight act. First she clearly did not expect anyone, then she was in his possession. "Two holes which he had made in the paper of the screen enabled him to see everything perfectly. Little by little she prepared herself for the night. She undid her hair, then did it up again in a loose knot. After which she took off her dress, her stays, her skirts, and all her under-garments. At last she was in her chemise. "She then, with a deep sigh, took a rosary, and began to pray. He himself was a religious man, and would fain have repeated his prayers after her, but he vainly tried to mumble a few words. All his thoughts were on her. "The moon was now in its full, and flooded the room with its mellow light, falling on her naked arms, on her rounded shoulders and small protruding breasts, shedding upon them all kinds of opaline tints, giving them the delicate gloss of satin and the sheen of amber, while the linen chemise fell in folds on her nether parts with the softness of flannel. "He remained there motionless, almost awe-stricken, with his eyes fastened upon her, holding his thick, feverish breath, gloating on her with that fixed eagerness with which the cat watches the mouse, or the hunter the game. All the powers of his body seemed concentrated in the sense of vision. "At last she finished her prayers, crossed herself, and rose. She lifted her right foot to get into her rather high bed, shewing the coachman her slender though well-shaped legs, her small but rounded buttocks, and, as she bent forward, the nether part of the two lips gaped, as one knee was already on the bed. "The coachman, however, had not time enough to see this, for with a cat-like bound he was already on her. "She uttered the faintest of cries, but he had already clasped her in his arms. "'Leave me! leave me! or I'll call for help.' "'Call as much as you like, darling; but no one can or will come to your help before I have had you, for I swear by the Virgin Mary that I'll not leave this room before I've enjoyed you. If that bougre can use you for his pleasure, so shall I. If he has not—well, after all it is better to be a poor man's wife than a rich man's whore; and you know whether I have been wanting to marry you or not.'

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My face was as scarlet, almost, as my jacket, my hair was ruffled, my lips looked bruised and swollen. I remembered the dildo at my hip, and stooped to unfasten it. Its lustre was cloudy now, and its nether straps were sodden and limp from my own lavish spendings; yet it was as indecently rigid and ready as before - that never happened with the gents in Soho. There was a handkerchief on the little table before the fire, and with this I wiped first it, and then myself. I lit two cigarettes, and left one smouldering. Then I poured myself a glass of wine and, in between gulps, began to retrieve my stockings, my trousers and my boots from the pile of clothes that lay strewn across the carpet. The lady reappeared, and seized her fag. She had changed into a dressing-gown of heavy green silk, and her feet were bare; she had that long second toe that you sometimes see on the statues done by the Greeks. Her hair had been properly unfastened, combed out, and rebound into a long, loose plait, and she had at last removed her white kid gloves. The flesh of her hands was almost as pale. ‘Do leave all that,’ she said, nodding towards the trousers over my arm. ‘The maid will deal with it in the morning.’ Then she saw the dildo, and caught it up by one of its straps. ‘I should, however, remove this.’ I was not sure that I had heard her properly. ‘The morning?’ I said. ‘Do you mean that I should stay?’ ‘Why, of course.’ She looked genuinely surprised. ‘Are you not able? Will you be missed?’ I felt light-headed suddenly. I told her that I lodged with a lady who, though she would wonder at my absence, wouldn’t worry over it. Then she asked if I had an employer - perhaps at the laundry I had mentioned ? - who would expect me on the morrow. I laughed at that, and shook my head: ‘There is no one at all to miss me. I’ve only myself to think of and please.’ As I said it, the toy at her thigh began to swing. She said, ‘You did, before tonight. Now, however, you have me ...’ Her words, her expression, made a mockery of my efforts with the handkerchief: I was wet for her anew. I reunited my trousers with her discarded petticoats, and added my jacket to the pile. Next door, the silken counterpane had been turned back, and the sheets beneath looked very white and cool. The chest kept its still, enigmatic place at the foot of the bed. The clock on the mantel showed half-past two.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting.27 It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel. As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them. The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?” In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation. The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic—the sensual—those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.28 Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. Later, when both of us stood in front of the bathroom mirror, we looked like we were wearing our graves, dazzling with dirt, musky with the soil we’d turned on its back. Overnight, the holes contracted into nostril-holes, breathing out a fog that was thick as whisked egg, a fog that would fly far northwest to squat on top of the Bay Bridge. The fog smelled like fucking, like us, like our sweat fermented into sweet pudding, and when it began to rise, we found the last letter sprouting out of the 口’s lips.

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

  We were sitting on Wanda’s ottoman. She wore her ermine jacket, her hair was loose and fell like a lion’s mane down her back. She clung to my lips, drawing my soul from my body. My head whirled, my blood began to seethe, my heart beat violently against hers. “I want to be absolutely in your power, Wanda,” I exclaimed suddenly, seized by that frenzy of passion when I can scarcely think clearly or decide freely. “I want to put myself absolutely at your mercy for good or evil without any condition, without any limit to your power.” While saying this I had slipped from the ottoman, and lay at her feet looking up at her with drunken eyes. “How beautiful you now are,” she exclaimed, “your eyes half-broken in ecstacy fill me with joy, carry me away. How wonderful your look would be if you were being beaten to death, in the extreme agony. You have the eye of a martyr.” * * * * * Sometimes, nevertheless, I have an uneasy feeling about placing myself so absolutely, so unconditionally into a woman’s hands. Suppose she did abuse my passion, her power? Well, then I would experience what has occupied my imagination since my childhood, what has always given me the feeling of seductive terror. A foolish apprehension! It will be a wanton game she will play with me, nothing more. She loves me, and she is good, a noble personality, incapable of a breach of faith. But it lies in her hands —if she wants to she can. What a temptation in this doubt, this fear! Now I understand Manon l’Escault and the poor chevalier, who, even in the pillory, while she was another man’s mistress, still adored her. Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers everything, because it must. It is not our judgment that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults which we discover, that make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us. It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it, and ask not whither? * * * * * A Russian prince made his first appearance today on the promenade. He aroused general interest on account of his athletic figure, magnificent face, and splendid bearing. The women particularly gaped at him as though he were a wild animal, but he went his way gloomily without paying attention to any one. He was accompanied by two servants, one a negro, completely dressed in red satin, and the other a Circassian in his full gleaming uniform. Suddenly he saw Wanda, and fixed his cold piercing look upon her; he even turned his head after her, and when she had passed, he stood still and followed her with his eyes. And she—she veritably devoured him with her radiant green eyes—and did everything possible to meet him again.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The very word erotic comes from the Greek eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.68 However, some black feminists have chosen to map a binary and heteronormative read onto Lorde’s erotic that implies that the erotic can only be achieved by a transcendence of mere sex, or by eschewing sex that isn’t regulated to the realms of romantic love or the spiritual. For example, in Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins challenges my critique of how young women in hip-hop culture use both sex and sexuality as a type of currency that is commonly interpreted as “erotic power.” Casting it as my “misread” of Lorde (whom I deliberately do not engage in the context of hip-hop and hood sexual politics), Collins goes on to contrast “erotic” with “sex/fucking.” The former, she writes, requires an engagement with “the honest body.” Rebelling against the rules and reclaiming the erotic means that Black straight and gay people alike can support one another in claiming honest bodies that are characterized by sexual autonomy. Using one’s honest body engages all forms of sexual expression that bring pleasure and joy. Overall, soul, expressiveness, spirituality, sensuality, sexuality, and an expanded notion of the erotic as a life force that may include all of these ideas seem to be tightly bundled together within this notion of an honest body that is not alienated from itself and where each individual has the freedom to pursue his or her sense of the erotic.69 Rather than the embrace the pairing Hill Collins suggests, my hope is for a pleasure politics that actively, adamantly resists it. My interest is in a capacious casting of the erotic that includes black women’s variegated sexual and non-sexual engagements with deeply internal sites of power and pleasure—among them expressions of sex and sexuality that deliberately resists binaries. Like L. H. Stallings, I am interested in erotic space that: looks at the constructions of Black female subjectivities cognizant of autonomous sexual desires. (And ask) how do Black women use culture to explore sexual desire that is spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional, and fluid so as to avoid splits or binaries that can freeze Black women’s radical sexual subjectivities? It is not easy.70 In other words, I want an erotic that demands space be made for honest bodies that like to also fuck.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother had one too, on her left arm, and I liked the way it puckered like a nipple when it was cold. My mother’s FOB dot was lake-shaped, waiting to be entered. I wanted one too, wanted to dig the scar out of Ben’s arm and swallow its pearl. We stopped on the sidewalk between an acupuncture clinic and a seafood store with a sign that said it was selling shrimp that you had to fish yourself from a kiddie pool. Ben nodded up at an apartment building that had been painted white and was now yellowing like teeth. She went up the stairs without looking at me, her hand skimming rust off the railing. Halfway up, she turned to look down at me. My grandmother, she said from above, is not really dead. Her grandmother, I’d later learn, was in Ningxia raising camels to scam tourists, charging a hundred dollars per ride. Her family sounded as slant-teethed as mine. I thought of all the stories I could tell her about my own grandmother, my ama who owned a severed head and could stitch a chicken’s head back on with a sewing machine. Ben would know how to tilt my words, listen to them at an angle. Her teeth came out only at night, like the stars, and her smile stung like a fistful of salt flung at your eyes. It took me two hours to walk home by myself. The city described itself differently in the dark, the streets liquefying beneath me. I got lost and circled my own house twice before recognizing my mother’s head in the kitchen window. My mother asked if I knew there were men in the world. Yes, I said, and went to bed before she could describe all my deaths. In the dark, I allowed myself to remember Ben’s face, her breath like a moth beating my cheek. I wanted to lick the back of her sun-mothered neck. In the dark, I could touch myself anywhere and pretend my hand was her hand. I could pretend my sounds were coming from outside, originating with the owls. The next morning, before I tucked my tail into my underwear, I let it rest in my hand like a hilt. It looked different to me, honed, whittled around its bone. Ben came to school early, leaning against the backstop to wait for me. She said hello in a dialect I didn’t know and I answered in English. I bent to drink from the water fountain in the dugout, swallowing slow so she’d have to watch me, water collecting in the fountain like a birdbath, my tongue flitting in and out of the stream. _ We spent every day with our shoulder blades unsheathed, our T-shirts knotted up to show our belly buttons, our elbows rubbing like flint when we walked down the hallways side by side, skin sparked with tanbark-burns from wrestling on the playground. We licked each other down to wicks.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  No one was home but the light coming in through the window-hole. We took off our shirts and I shut my eyes to the room, my hands on the back her neck. Her tongue towed its heat across my belly. She straddled me, lifting my arms and licking the pits, the black patch of hair where sweat dewed, where I smelled most like myself. We butted mouths, backed up, laughed. I propped myself up on my elbows and kissed along the slant of her rib. Her hands around my breasts like unbroken bread. The key dangled from her neck and hung above me, lowering into my mouth. I took it on my tongue and suckled it, the key’s teeth a copy of my own. When she sat up, the key jerked out of my mouth and caught my upper lip like a fishhook, lancing it open. A key, she said, looking down at me. The key swung between us, gilded with spit and lip-blood. Your tail, Ben said. I think it’s a key. _ Ben and I squatted in my backyard. All holes, she said, just need a key . I tried to follow her, but my mind was still on her mouth. Ben crouched over the one in the center, the 口 . Where does this one go? she said, and I said I didn’t know. Like all bodies, they didn’t lead anywhere except inside themselves. She turned her back to the hole and squatted over it like she was taking a shit, demonstrating what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to feed my tail to the hole, to slide it in like a key. I pulled down my pants and dangled my tail in. The hole healed around my tail, soil shifting as it swallowed me. When the hole opened its mouth again, I fell forward onto my knees. Stand vigil, Ben said. Hours after the sun was gone, the hole spoke its first word. I listened for its hum. The 口 squinted, spat out something white and tongue-slimed. Tugging it loose, I flipped it in my hands. It was skin, wet from being born, poreless and soft. Both sides of it were dyed with words. Inside the house, I turned on the kitchen light and held the hide to my face, deciphering the dark between each word. A few of the fragments were written in characters, but the only one I recognized was my mother’s maiden name. The rest were written in an alphabet. It was my handwriting, my way of stringing letters neat as beads, but the words weren’t mine. The skin was moth-holed: My mother said that Ama treated every pen like a needle, piercing holes to make meaning.

• 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.