An essay or a prose poem?

This was listed as an essay in Five Points journal, but I think of it as a prose poem:

What I Think About When Someone Uses “Pussy” as a Synonym for “Weak”

At the deepest part of the deepest part, I rocked shut like a stone. I’d climbed as far inside me as I could. Everything else had fallen away: Midwife, husband, bedroom, world: quaint concepts. My eyes were clamshells. My ears were clapped shut by the palms of the dead. My throat was stoppered with bees. Continue reading “An essay or a prose poem?”

More Fennelly

A few weeks ago I posted a poem by Beth Ann Fennelly, I’d found in anthology of erotica. I have been looking at a couple of her books, and thought I’d post another today, a different kind of erotic.

Once I Did Kiss Her Wetly on the Mouth

Once I did kiss her wetly on the mouth
and her lips loosened, her tongue rising like a fish
to swim in my waters
because she learns the world
by tasting it, by taking it inside. Continue reading “More Fennelly”

Poetry Monday: Erotica

Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile know about my passion for libraries, how I like to have a card for any library I pass so I can go in and get a book.

stacksThe only card I pay for is my UC Berkeley library card, and going there is a bit of an expedition, involving finding a parking space, at least a 10-minute walk, and usually a specific quest for a book I can’t get elsewhere. So it’s a disappointment when the book I’ve carefully looked up online and gone to get isn’t available, which happened a few weeks ago when the main library stacks were closed due to a power failure, which was itself due to an explosion caused by the theft of copper wire from a University power plant, a whole other story–one for someone else to write.

All of which is a preamble to explain why I wandered the undergraduate library for consolation, and came home with a book called The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present, edited by David Lehman. The poems are arranged by the poets’ year of birth, and I find it depressing that people very much younger than I can write so well. In some moods, of course, I find it encouraging, but rarely. Continue reading “Poetry Monday: Erotica”