Barbara Hamby: St. Clare’s Underwear
there’s your average man, hirsute and raging with testosterone,
Godzilla incarnato, King Kong with big feet, Frankenstein
hovering over some delectable damsel with skin like fresh pastry
Video: Soft Animals by Renee Zhan
In this wildly imaginative surrealistic narrative, two ex-lovers cross paths at a train station.
Angele Ellis: Midnight in the Backyard of Lust and Longing
In her new poetry collection, Alexis Rhone Fancher Boldly Explores the Landscape of Sensuality
Emmelie Prophète: Pipo
Pipo often talked about fallen friends, their final, frozen, empty vision, almost as if he were feeling his own demise. He was close to and a cousin of Fanfan the Savage, but he was not an active gang member, and should never have died.
Song of Songs, Canticles 1-8
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys[….]
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
Jonathan Kaplan: Why is a love poem full of sex in the Bible? Readers have been struggling with the Song of Songs for 2,000 years
Feminist readings have highlighted the female character’s power, autonomy and sensuality. Conservative Christians, meanwhile, often approach the poem as an ideal expression of acceptable love between a husband and wife.
Dawn Potter: The Unicorn Is in Captivity and No Longer Dead
Which do I like better, someone asks, fork or spoon?
And I reply, That’s not a question for Thursday.
Ask me instead how I lost my virginity,
William Carlos Williams: Sonnet in Search of an Author
Nude bodies like peeled logs
sometimes give off a sweetest
odor, man and woman
Rebecca Weiner Tompkins: Adultery
Dark pines and thin silvery trees
throw shadows on your face lowering to meet mine;
we make love, wrapped in heavy coats,
knees bumping glove box and seatback.
Danielle DeTiberus: In the Middle of Fucking You, I Pause
Twenty years together and yet
You were new to me again.
Lindsey Royce: Purification And All That Fuckery
My hovel, my mess—surfaces like baseball mounds, my pubic mound—books papers piled, my checkbook math, an epic fail—cleanliness, godliness—washing the carpet, the body—a good Catholic girl I was scared of … Continue reading
Jeffrey Harrison: The Mount
the blue-jeaned ass of the one on top
moving up and down, pelvis cramming
noiselessly into the rump of the one
underneath, whose vacant eye
caught mine for an instant as I walked past
Deesha Philyaw: I Am Not My Ancestors
‘Just don’t try and make a world out of a man, especially a man who’ll still be a boy when you a full-grown woman.’
Michelle Bitting: Ode to Sex with You
lips two wild pulsing fish
swift bubbles of nothing
moaned into the air’s
naked ear
