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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My landlady says to thank you for the oysters...’ It was very cosy on the sofa, with everyone about me so gay; but at half-past ten or so Kitty yawned - and at that I gave a jump, and rose, and said it was my bedtime. I paid a hasty visit to the privy out the back, then ran upstairs and changed into my nightgown double-quick - you might have thought I had been kept from sleeping for a week and was about to die of tiredness. But I was not sleepy at all; it was only that I wanted to be safely abed before Kitty appeared - safely still and calm and ready for that moment that must shortly come, when she would be beside me in the dark, and there would be nothing but the two flimsy lengths of our cotton nightgowns to separate her own warm limbs from mine.She came about a half-hour later. I didn’t look at her or say her name, and she didn’t greet me, only moved very quietly about the room - assuming, I suppose, I was asleep, for I was lying very straight on my side and had my eyes hard shut. There was a little noise from the rest of the house - a laugh, and the closing of a door, and the rushing of water through distant pipes. But then all was calm again; and soon there were only the gentle sounds of her undressing: the tiny volley of thuds as she pulled at the buttons on her bodice; the rustle of her skirt, and then of her petticoat; the sighing of the laces through the eyes of her stays. At last there came the slap of her feet on the floorboards, and I guessed that she must be quite naked.I had turned the gas down, but left a candle burning for her. I knew that if I opened my eyes now, and tilted my face, I should see her clad in nothing but shadows and the candle-flame’s amber glow.But I did not turn; and soon there was another rustling, that meant she had pulled on her nightgown. In a moment the light was extinguished; the bed creaked and heaved; and she was lying beside me, very warm and horribly real.She sighed. I felt her breath upon my neck and knew that she was gazing at me. Her breath came a second time, and then a third, then: ‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered.‘No,’ I said, for I could pretend no longer. I rolled on to my back. The movement brought us even closer together - it really was an extremely narrow bed - so I shifted, rather hurriedly, to my left, until I could not have shifted any further without falling out. Now her breath was upon my cheek, and warmer than before.She said, ‘Do you miss your home, and Alice?’ I shook my head. ‘Not just a little?’‘Well...’I felt her smile.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Besides this there was an album of photographs of big-buttocked girls with hairless parts, bearing feathers; also a collection of erotic pamphlets and novels, all hymning the delights of what I would call tommistry but what they, like Diana, called Sapphic Passion. They were gross enough, I suppose, in their way; but I had never seen the like of them before, and would gaze at them, squirming, till Diana laughed. Then there were cords, and straps and switches - the kind of thing that might be found, I suppose, in a strict governess’s closet, certainly nothing heavier. Lastly, there were more of Diana’s rose-tipped cigarettes. They contained, as I guessed very early on, some fragrant French tobacco that was mixed with hashish; and they were, I thought, the pleasantest things of all, since, when used in combination with the other items, they rendered their interesting effects more interesting still.I might be weary or stupid; I might be nauseous with drink; I might be sore, at the hips, with the ache of my monthlies, but the opening of this box, as I have said, never ceased to stir me - I was like a dog twitching and slavering to hear his mistress call out Bone!And every jerk, every slaver, made Diana more complacent.‘How vain I am, of my little hoard!’ she would say, a we lay smoking in the soiled sheets of her bed. She might be clad in nothing but a corset and a pair of purple gloves; I would have the dildo about me, perhaps with a rope of pearls wound round it. She would reach to the foot of the bed, and run her hand across the gaping box, and laugh. ‘Of all the gifts I’ve given you,’ she said once, ‘this is the finest, isn’t it, isn’t it? Where in London would you find its like?’‘Nowhere!’ I answered. ‘You’re the boldest bitch in the city!’‘I am!’‘You’re the boldest bitch, with the cleverest quim. If fucking were a country - well, fuck me, you’d be its queen ... !’These were the words which, pricked on by my mistress, I used now - lewd words which shocked and stirred me even as I said them. I had never thought to use them with Kitty. I had not fucked her, we had not frigged; we had only ever kissed and trembled.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I have friends with game and friends without it, and friends who have it but think they don’t, and those who think they have it but actually don’t. Lately I have been asked to help a few friends out with basic flirtation skills. In trying to understand the art of flirtation enough to be of use, I’ve noticed some things. All game is not created equal, and it’s largely misunderstood. The quality of game is much more about being honest and being yourself than being smooth. It’s not about small talk, filling the space, or easing the awkwardness. It’s letting true desire and curiosity come to the forefront of an interaction. Flirtation, or game, is a great way to map out the visible and invisible landscape of another, with your titillation intact. I became aware that I had game in my late twenties. Something clicked between my body and me after years of depression and therapy. I began to believe that my desires mattered. Before I believed that my desires mattered, it was nearly impossible for me to tell if attraction was mutual, because when I was sober I couldn’t believe anyone would really be attracted to me. Now I’m only into people who are worshipful with my body and my heart and who inspire that in me. And I can assess that mutual quality of worship after a few moments of good flirtation. I define game as the ability to engage potential mutual attraction in ways that grow the chemistry. There’s not necessarily a sexual end goal, but the territory of sex is the thinly veiled landscape of good game: the pace and power dynamics of sex are part of the process, the nonverbal cues are weighted to deepen the sensual connection. I used to blurt out my desire and then crash into my lovers like a wave, often knocking them over with my uninhibited commitment to pleasure. Now I still do this, but I’ve learned to be more clear with myself and others about how powerful my desire is and what I want. I’m still learning to enjoy communicating those things. In the spirit of creating safer, braver sexual space for all of us, here are a few quick tips for getting your game up: Notice the nonverbal cues before starting a conversation. We are all unlearning coy—if someone is avoiding your eyes, it’s intentional. Lingering eye contact is a great way to begin a flirtation. And if you feel a little smile coming, let it show, that’s real. Be yourself. They’re going to meet your real self eventually. Might as well lead with it and save yourself the whole relationship phase where you’re both actually obsessed with each other’s projections. Let yourself show, and the right people will be compelled by you. Release the end goal. Let yourself really be present with the person in front of you, really see them, attend to them, compliment them. Learn from the journey. The play.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. 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.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  2 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “Wherein I Write about Sex (5 Tangible Tools of a Pleasure Activist),” February 12, 2014, http://adriennemareebrown.net/2014/02/12/wherein-i-write-about-sex-5-tangible-tools-of-a-pleasure-activist. Beyoncé was released with no warning on December 13, 2013.3 In the lineage of somatics I study, we articulate commitments that we aspire to embody. At this time of this blog entry, mine was “a commitment to my body being a practice ground for transformation.”4 I have an incredible, vibrant, and supportive online community around this now, people in practice of shifting our relationships toward sugar and away from obsession, addiction, binging, and purging; toward moderation, balance, boundaries, and health. We lift each other up and cheer each other on.5 Perhaps my first love was a best friend I had when I was very young. We made out, touched each other, and I thought she was the best and coolest person on earth. Her mother put a stop to our grand baby affair in a way that left a lifelong interest in me for healthy ways to engage children around their bodies and feelings without shaming them.6 Quoting Mae West.7 The location is called One Taste, and the method and location have both been raved about and have been a spot of controversy and harm in my networks, so I would say come to your own conclusions here, as with anything else. I can only testify that the method, when focused on the self, is quite effective.section three: A Circle of SexConversation with a Sex ToyThe Womanizer is an unfortunate name for a relatively new sex toy that gently suctions the clitoris while vibrating around it8. Basically wowzerpants. amb. Can we talk about sex and desire? Womanizer. I didn’t know you knew how to put words into coherent sentences. amb. [blushing] I could say the same thing about you. You are such an incredible, miraculous toy. Womanizer. Thank you. I’m glad to be so effective. Sometimes I wish I knew more about pace, foreplay—me, my kind, we get such short, focused times with y’all. There’s no romance. amb. One time I did the candle thing … Womanizer. I’m not upset, honey. I feel proud of my results. I think it’s actually super-important to empower all humans to produce the healing that I give without having to negotiate it with anyone else. amb. I agree. I wish sex education was actually much more focused on what pleasure feels like, getting to know the sensual and sexual pleasures of our bodies before we share them with others, getting to know the distinct energy between yes and no. Womanizer. Yes, for so long pleasure has been controlled and vilified, which I think is because it’s actually so powerful. To know that you can access, in your own body, that kind of liberation and wholeness and being fully present right here, right now—it’s so much easier to dominate people who don’t know how to access their own pleasure. amb. Within and beyond the realm of sex.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben’s favorite animal was an anteater, which she pronounced auntie tear . My favorite animal was a white tiger because I was born in the year of the tiger, and because I assumed anything born white must have a better chance at life. I was right: White tigers had a longer life span in captivity. In our school library, which was just an extra shelf in the back corner of the classroom, we memorized whole pages of the National Geographic encyclopedia, mispronouncing the genus of our species. We pronounced the Ho in Homo not like home but like hostage . The Big Cats spread was our favorite: We wanted flashlight eyes that turned on at night. We went to the bathroom and shut off the lights, foraging for our faces in the dark. In the dark, she made a fist around my braid and presented it back to me like a bouquet. When I told her my favorite animal was the tiger, Ben told me that tigers in myths were always men. What animals are women? I asked, and she named everything with wings: cranes, phoenixes, geese. I knew from my mother’s stories that snakes were also women, shucking off their skins beneath the meat of the moon. Whenever we ditched, Ben and I compared our breasts in the restroom. There were three tin-walled stalls and a faucet that never stopped drooling. The tile floor had potholes of piss. We stood on the toilets like they were islands we were native to, each of us balanced on one side of the seat rim, steering each other’s arms. We lifted our shirts. We believed our nipples would someday open into eyes. Bras were blindfolds that our mothers wore to protect their eye-nipples from constant light. My nipples were darker and hers were hairier: hairs I wanted to make a career out of counting. I thought I could blink my nipples like eyes, squinting or dilating them depending on her distance from me. My tail turned copper with sweat and knotted against my lower back whenever she came near. I was afraid to show her its length, in case she pulled on it like a lever by accident, transforming me into Hu Gu Po. I’d bite off her breasts, scoop them clean like grapefruits and flush away the skins. One day in the restroom, I asked her if she knew the story of Hu Gu Po. We stood on the toilet seat, holding the hooks of each other’s arms. I wanted to ask if she saw a resemblance between the story and me, but Ben said no, she’d never heard it. It’s about a tiger spirit, I said, who wants to be a woman . But to keep her body, she eats only what she can kill. She shells toes and calls them peanuts. My mother said it was the only story she wanted me to own. My inheritance was hurt.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Like Hammonds’ call for a “politics of articulation,” these scholars’ works can be reasonably interpreted as a decisive demand for a black feminist sexuality theory that is inclusive of pleasure and the erotic. It is a call that has gone relatively unmet or countered with polarizing resistance. Iterations of Certain black feminists need to stop talking about twerking and pleasure and turn their attention back to structural inequalities have grown common in feminist digital terrains. But this ubiquitous reign of silence also speaks to what I’ve identified as a methodological sluggishness in BFT when it comes to theorizing our sexuality. We’ve become overly reliant on the field’s most trenchant theories—specifically Kimberle Crenshaw’s “intersectionality,” Patricia Collins’ “controlling images,” Audre Lorde’s deployment of the erotic, Higginbotham’s “respectability politics,” Hine’s “cultural dissemblance.”67 Bequeathing them the sanctity of dogma and rendering them impervious to the changes of time, we’ve often failed to re-interrogate these venerated interventions with the temporal, cultural specificity reflected in contemporary US black women’s ethnic heterogeneity, queerness and the advent of digital technologies and social media. By ignoring these changes, we’ve rendered BFT incapable of addressing the variegated landscape of black female sexuality or reading contemporary black women’s cultural production for pleasure. Until we do, we will continue to inextricably link trauma and violence to black women’s lived and historical experiences and negate pleasure as frivolous, irrelevant, or “unfeminist.” I position, quite deliberately, “Pleasure Politics” as a liberatory, black feminist project. It elevates the need for sexual autonomy and erotic agency without shame to the level of black feminist imperative. Accordingly, a politics of pleasure operates with an empirical understanding that feminist principles do not necessarily legislate desire. Black women’s erotic maps exist on an expansive spectrum, which could include non-heteronormative submissiveness, hyper-masculinity, aggression, exhibitionism, and voyeurism. Finally, it acknowledges that the hegemonic narrative of black female sexuality which dominates black feminist thought in the United States not only erases queer and transgender subjects but also ignores black multi-ethnicity and the diverse cultural influences currently operating in the world US black women occupy. Combatting racism, sexism and homophobia effectively in the midst of multiple pressures of neoliberalism, the current economic crisis, the decline of the US Empire require nuanced, careful interpretations of race, ethnicity, gender, nationhood, citizenship, and identity. Since it is an unwritten mandate that any black feminist work that explores the erotic engage Lorde’s “Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic as Power” it’s important for me to distinguish the ways my usage of the terms “erotic” and “erotic agency” differs from some black feminist theorists. Like Lorde, I seek a framing of the erotic [that] is both deliberate and expansive. I am there, head nodding with my fellow feminist theorists when Lorde writes:

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I have friends with game and friends without it, and friends who have it but think they don’t, and those who think they have it but actually don’t. Lately I have been asked to help a few friends out with basic flirtation skills. In trying to understand the art of flirtation enough to be of use, I’ve noticed some things. All game is not created equal, and it’s largely misunderstood. The quality of game is much more about being honest and being yourself than being smooth. It’s not about small talk, filling the space, or easing the awkwardness. It’s letting true desire and curiosity come to the forefront of an interaction. Flirtation, or game, is a great way to map out the visible and invisible landscape of another, with your titillation intact. I became aware that I had game in my late twenties. Something clicked between my body and me after years of depression and therapy. I began to believe that my desires mattered. Before I believed that my desires mattered, it was nearly impossible for me to tell if attraction was mutual, because when I was sober I couldn’t believe anyone would really be attracted to me. Now I’m only into people who are worshipful with my body and my heart and who inspire that in me. And I can assess that mutual quality of worship after a few moments of good flirtation. I define game as the ability to engage potential mutual attraction in ways that grow the chemistry. There’s not necessarily a sexual end goal, but the territory of sex is the thinly veiled landscape of good game: the pace and power dynamics of sex are part of the process, the nonverbal cues are weighted to deepen the sensual connection. I used to blurt out my desire and then crash into my lovers like a wave, often knocking them over with my uninhibited commitment to pleasure. Now I still do this, but I’ve learned to be more clear with myself and others about how powerful my desire is and what I want. I’m still learning to enjoy communicating those things. In the spirit of creating safer, braver sexual space for all of us, here are a few quick tips for getting your game up: Notice the nonverbal cues before starting a conversation. We are all unlearning coy—if someone is avoiding your eyes, it’s intentional. Lingering eye contact is a great way to begin a flirtation. And if you feel a little smile coming, let it show, that’s real. Be yourself. They’re going to meet your real self eventually. Might as well lead with it and save yourself the whole relationship phase where you’re both actually obsessed with each other’s projections. Let yourself show, and the right people will be compelled by you. Release the end goal. Let yourself really be present with the person in front of you, really see them, attend to them, compliment them. Learn from the journey. The play.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  15 This is the urgent campaign version of intimacy, the outcome-oriented work that is aware of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. This may include punishment, but only if you deserve it.16 Capitalist. Patriarch. Hierarch. Monarch. Selfish. King. Daddy. Owning Class.17 In political landscapes, this can be an alliance or coalition. We need to move together for a while—this is not our permanent home, but it does need to be satisfying.18 Ground rules. Community agreements.19 Microaggression.20 We have divergent conditions of satisfaction, but both of us get closer to what we want with this work.21 Political home, the delight of finding a place that can hold all of you, wants to.22 Let’s vision together. I like how you practice consensus. It is a joy to be in this life work with you.The Highs, Lows, and Blows of Casual Sexamb. What do you count as casual sex?23 Gary, thirty-eight, Black, gay cis man (name changed). One-night stands. Random hookups. Sex with a “fuck buddy.” Essentially, any sexual activity with a stranger or someone with whom I’m not romantically involved. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, forty-two, nonbinary disabled queer femme mixed Sri Lankan.24 Sex that happens outside of an ongoing relationship or a desire for ongoing relationship. Certain kinds of emotional intimacy or commitment. Sex where the connection is mostly about the sex. Holiday Simmons, thirty-nine, Black Cherokee transmasculine two-spirit person.25 I define casual sex as sex that is either no strings attached—there’s no expectation of continued contact afterward—or that there aren’t necessarily feelings involved at the time or later. Or there might be appreciation/love feelings but not necessarily romance, so, like, friends with benefits can have casual sex because it’s not romantic sex. Mai’a Williams, thirty-seven, Black, queer, cis woman, mama. Really, for me, casual sex is sex I have that doesn’t require other emotional labor. Like, I don’t have to care about your hard day at work or your relationship with your mom or a nightmare you had last week. I might care, I might not care, but I don’t have to care. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, thirty-nine, South Asian, straight, cis woman, author of Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life. I don’t really like the term “casual” next to “sex” because sex is not casual—it’s sex! Sex should be an intimate experience that relies on trust, communication, care, and honesty, which are not casual things, per se. I wish we could just call it, I don’t know, something that might denote both the lack of traditional relationship structures paired with being a sexually responsible adult (not an asshole). Maybe we just call it sex. amb. I love that reframe. So, why do you have casual sex? Samhita. Sex is good and nice—that’s why! I wish I was having more of it, though … Gary. The word “ephemeral” comes to mind, as does the acronym NSA (no strings attached). Casual sex is uncomplicated. Its singular focus is the here and now, indulging in the moment. It demands no commitment beyond the encounter itself.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. She looked at me without blinking, her mouth-O symmetrical to the holes. Waiting for her teeth to cleave me, I imagined my finger severed inside her mouth, twirling like a stem. Ben shut her eyes, her breath burning circles on the back of my hand. Her teeth clasped around my knuckle and then released, skimming the skin so lightly it reminded me of the time a wasp landed on my finger and sipped at my sweat. I’d been so afraid of moving, of baiting its sting, that I didn’t breathe. Coaxing my finger into a hook, I twisted it slow as a key until she opened for me. _ The next day, Ben thanked me for showing her the holes in my yard and said there was something she still hadn’t shown me yet. It was taco day at school, and we’d both poured the ground beef out of their neon shells and down our pants, laughing as the minced meat sagged our underwear. We ran up to the lunch chaperones and said we’d pooped ourselves, flashing our meat stains. They panicked and escorted us to the bathroom, excused us from our next class, and left us together while they scoured the lost and found for clean pants. When they left, Ben pushed me into the bathroom stall and told me to sit down and wait. I squatted on the toilet seat until she returned carrying the cage. She tugged me out of the stall by my wrist. In front of the finger-smeared mirror, she lifted the birdcage with both hands.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben’s favorite animal was an anteater, which she pronounced auntie tear. My favorite animal was a white tiger because I was born in the year of the tiger, and because I assumed anything born white must have a better chance at life. I was right: White tigers had a longer life span in captivity. In our school library, which was just an extra shelf in the back corner of the classroom, we memorized whole pages of the National Geographic encyclopedia, mispronouncing the genus of our species. We pronounced the Ho in Homo not like home but like hostage. The Big Cats spread was our favorite: We wanted flashlight eyes that turned on at night. We went to the bathroom and shut off the lights, foraging for our faces in the dark. In the dark, she made a fist around my braid and presented it back to me like a bouquet. When I told her my favorite animal was the tiger, Ben told me that tigers in myths were always men. What animals are women? I asked, and she named everything with wings: cranes, phoenixes, geese. I knew from my mother’s stories that snakes were also women, shucking off their skins beneath the meat of the moon. Whenever we ditched, Ben and I compared our breasts in the restroom. There were three tin-walled stalls and a faucet that never stopped drooling. The tile floor had potholes of piss. We stood on the toilets like they were islands we were native to, each of us balanced on one side of the seat rim, steering each other’s arms. We lifted our shirts. We believed our nipples would someday open into eyes. Bras were blindfolds that our mothers wore to protect their eye-nipples from constant light. My nipples were darker and hers were hairier: hairs I wanted to make a career out of counting. I thought I could blink my nipples like eyes, squinting or dilating them depending on her distance from me. My tail turned copper with sweat and knotted against my lower back whenever she came near. I was afraid to show her its length, in case she pulled on it like a lever by accident, transforming me into Hu Gu Po. I’d bite off her breasts, scoop them clean like grapefruits and flush away the skins. One day in the restroom, I asked her if she knew the story of Hu Gu Po. We stood on the toilet seat, holding the hooks of each other’s arms. I wanted to ask if she saw a resemblance between the story and me, but Ben said no, she’d never heard it. It’s about a tiger spirit, I said, who wants to be a woman. But to keep her body, she eats only what she can kill. She shells toes and calls them peanuts. My mother said it was the only story she wanted me to own. My inheritance was hurt.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I was occasionally sulky, but, as on the night of our trip to the opera, she found ways of turning my sulkiness to her own lewd advantage - in the end, I hardly knew if I were really cross or only feigning crossness for the sake of her letches. Once or twice I hoped she would make me cross - fucking her in a rage, I found, could at the right moment be more thrilling than fucking her in kindness.Anyway, we went on like this. Then one night there was some quarrel over a suit. We were dressing for a supper at Maria‘s, and I would not wear the clothes she picked for me. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘you may wear what you please!’ And she took the carriage, and went off to Hampstead without me. I threw a cup against the wall — then sent for Blake to come and tidy it. And when she came, I remembered how pleasant it had been to chat with her before; and I made her sit with me, and tell me more about her plans.And after that, she would come and spend a minute or two with me whenever Diana was out; and she became easier with me, and I grew freer with her. And at last I said to her: ‘Lord, Blake, you’ve been emptying my pot for me for more than a year, and I don’t even know what your first name is!’She smiled, and again looked handsome.Her name was Zena. Her name was Zena, and her story was a sad one. I had it from her one morning in the autumn of that year, as I lay in Diana’s bed, and she came, as usual, to bring breakfast and to see to the fire. Diana herself had risen early, and gone out. I woke to find Zena kneeling at the hearth, working quietly with the coals so as not to disturb me. I shifted beneath the sheets, feeling lazy as an eel. My quim - in the clever way of quims - was still quite slippery, from the passion of the night before.I lay watching her. She raised a hand to scratch her brow, and when she took the hand away she left a smudge of soot there. Her face, against the smudge, seemed very pale and rather pinched. I said, ‘Zena’, and she gave a jump: ‘Yes, miss?’I hesitated; then, ‘Zena,’ I said again, ‘don’t mind me asking you something, but I can’t help but think of it. Diana once told me - well, that she got you out of a prison. Is it true?’She turned back to the hearth, and continued to pile coals upon the fire; but I saw her ears turn crimson. She said. ‘They call it a reformat’ry.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Then he began to praise woman and the pleasures of the flesh. When they inquired more particularly about the women, the devil said he would descend and bring one back with him. This he did. The woman was decked in jewels and gold and beautiful of form. The angels were inflamed with passion, and Satan seeing this, took her and left heaven. The angels followed. The exodus continued for nine days and nights, when God closed up the fissure which had been made.991 The Cathari divided themselves into two classes, the Perfecti and the Credentes, or Believers. The Perfect were those who had received the rite of the consolamentum , and were also called bons hommes,992 good men, or good Christians, or the Girded, vestiti ,993 from the fact that after receiving the

• 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)

  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.