ISSUE 1 - SAPPHIC

CONTENTS

Cyprus-born, in dream we two were talking.*

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Lavender Review. The theme of this issue is anything related to Sapphic: By Lesbians. About Lesbians. About Sappho. In Sapphics.

This is a controversial theme from all angles. On the one hand, I sometimes sense that lesbians and feminists feel that “writing poems in form is like sleeping with the patriarchy.” (Thanks to Marilyn L. Taylor for that marvelous phrase.) On the other hand, mainstream literary culture sometimes seems dubious about whether both lesbians and formalists are capable of writing great poems.

Sappho’s poems dissolve all controversies. Her poems are indisputably great. She invented the form that we call Sapphics. And her love for women was likely as common and accepted by her culture as that of Plato’s love for men. (“Surely the attitude of Maximus of Tyre is reasonable when he suggests that her group was similar to the group that surrounded Socrates. No perceptive reader can read Plato's accounts of the Socratic milieu without being aware of the erotic atmosphere that is often evident, although to accuse Socrates of hedonism would be ridiculous.” POETRY ) In short, Sappho, in our terminology, was a lesbian formalist who wrote great poems.

Someone, I tell you,
will remember us.

You came very close to being completely obliterated by those who hated you, Sappho. But “No one will forget you again,” Elizabeth Oakes’ poem, “To Sappho,” reassures us in this issue. Many poets have written poems inspired by the fragments (H.D.); many poets have written Sapphics (Poetry Society); and Swinburne’s poem, “Sapphics,” attempts “to create the effect of the ancient Aeolian metre in a daring and brilliant stanza.” (1911 Encyclopedia)

Poets fight an uphill battle trying to be heard; lesbian poets fight doubly hard trying to be heard in our heterocentric culture. So it’s a double pleasure when male poets reach out to lesbians, as R. Nemo Hill does in “The Girls Are In The Trees,” and as John Whitworth does in his astute triolet, “The Poets at Drumcliff.” Like magic, Nemo’s poem seemed to attract poems about trees. Please let’s have more poems from Freda Karpf, like the one in which “i was moving up the tree.” As I collected the poems for this issue, trees, apples, bees, moon, streets, and wreckage became the leitmotifs:

Freda Karpf’s “cool moon” and “crazy drunk bees”; Eleanor Lerman’s “wrecked moon”; Minnie Bruce Pratt’s “The Moon, Reading” and “tree we climbed”; Ann Tweedy’s “Inside the Wreckage”; Judy Grahn’s “sky trees” and “my heart / is an apple tree”; Mary Kathryn Arnold’s “danger across the street”; Jan Steckel’s “Castro Street”; Eileen Myles’ “homeless are wandering the streets”; Ali Liebegott’s “steaming in the street”; Janet Kenny’s “traffic clanking”; Joan Annsfire’s wreckage in every note of “Distant Music”; and Suzanne Gardinier’s “tower fragments.”

These poems come from poets in the U.S., Canada, England, Wales, Australia, and Greece. Special thanks to Ann Drysdale, for contributing a custom-written poem for this issue, a spectacular poem in Sapphics after Baudelaire, and another heartwarming reach across the divide between straight and lesbian. For tastes and scents of lust forgotten, lost, and remembered, sample the poems from Joy Howard and Barbara A. Taylor.

Rachel Hadas contributed two visionary poems in Sapphics: a gorgeous ekphrastic of Botticelli, and “Pomology,” which develops this Sappho fragment:

Like a sweet apple reddening on the high
tip of the topmost branch and forgotten
by the apple pickers, not missed but beyond their
reach.

Also in this issue are three poems from A.E. Stallings, who, like “Hesperos of all stars is the most beautiful.” Willis Barnstone graciously contributed his translation, “Return, Gongyla,” which spells out, for all those who seek to suppress Sappho’s lesbianism, Sappho’s passion for Gongyla, “whom of all women / I most desire.” Barnstone’s strikingly strong and spare drawing of Sappho, from the cover of his Ancient Greek Lyrics (Indiana U, 2009), is based on the Sappho on a Roman sculpture found at Ephesos.

Collecting these poems and images gave me a beautiful long sweet spell of dreaming. Many thanks to the contributors. And many thanks to you, Sappho, for giving inspiration to poets, courage to lesbians, and to me, the feeling that by writing poems in the form you created, I can almost touch you.

Mary Meriam, Editor
July, 2010

*All translations of Sappho in this editorial are courtesy of Willis Barnstone.

ISSUE 1 - SAPPHIC - CONTENTS

POETRY

ART

R. NEMO HILL The Girls Are In The Trees JOHN WHITWORTH The Poets at Drumcliff FREDA KARPF five poems RACHEL HADAS Mars and Venus Pomology ELEANOR LERMAN Beloved Storm Country A.E. STALLINGS three poems MINNIE BRUCE PRATT The Moon, Reading The Place Lost and Gone, the Place Found MARY KATHRYN ARNOLD Christine Naomi ANN TWEEDY Inside the Wreckage Harbor ELIZABETH OAKES To Sappho JAN STECKEL three poems EILEEN MYLES An American Poem JUDY GRAHN three poems ALI LIEBEGOTT Grates and Bridges JANET KENNY Butterflies SAPPHO - WILLIS BARNSTONE Return, Gongyla JOAN ANNSFIRE Distant Music Enemy SUZANNE GARDINIER 89 ANN DRYSDALE Sailing to Lesbos JOY HOWARD Old Acquaintance BARBARA A. TAYLOR tanka SWINBURNE Sapphics

R. NEMO HILL The Girls Are In The Trees (2010) EZIO CARDARELLI Drumcliff (2003) BETTY PARSONS Autumn (1965) BOTTICELLI Mars and Venus (c. 1475) ROMAINE BROOKS Femme Avec Des Fleurs (1912) BRYGOS PAINTER Vase, Athens (480–470 BCE) ROBERT GIARD Minnie Bruce Pratt and Leslie Feinberg (1993) BERENICE ABBOTT Djuna Barnes, Paris (1926) MARIE LAURENCIN Cecilia de Madrazo and the Dog Coco (1915) JULIA MARGARET CAMERON Sappho (1865) HEW WOLFF Jan with Pink Elephants (2010) EILEEN MYLES Eileen Myles LYNDA KOOLISH Grahn (1972) AMOS MAC Ali Liebegott (2010) AUGUSTE RENOIR Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) WILLIS BARNSTONE Sappho (2009) CLAUDE CAHUN Self-Portrait (1928) R. NEMO HILL Loosed (2010) THEO ANGELOPOULOS Voyage to Cythera, Greece (1984) GUSTAVE COURBET Venus Pursuing Psyche with her Jealousy (1866) HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC In Bed (1892) SIMEON SOLOMON Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864)

R. Nemo Hill

The Girls Are In The Trees

Up from a crown of green break free these three
bright blossom-crusted branches, and from these
ascends a music pitched past anarchy:
near dusk, the girls are once more in the trees.
But what apocalypse has moved them so,
what orgy in high heaven, or what riot
they bear impassioned witness to below—
their frenzied warnings can but amplify it.

Mad bird song yields a carnage all its own,
a crop of bruised pink petals, shaken free
from all but color caught by dying sun.
They’re falling all around me, voicelessly.
They’re floating down. They stain my arms and hands
with drops of angels’ blood, paler than man’s.


(Petulu, Bali—2000)
(for Mary Meriam)

---

R. Nemo Hill is the author of an illustrated novel, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane, 2002); a narrative poem, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus, 2004); and a chapbook, Prolegomena to an Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics, 2006). He lives in New York City where he is Editor and Publisher of EXOT BOOKS.

R. Nemo Hill

R. Nemo Hill, The Girls Are In The Trees (2010)

John Whitworth

The Poets at Drumcliff

Ursula and Rosie took me there in their car.
‘Off you go, John,‘ said Rosie when we drew up
outside the graveyard, ‘We’ve already seen it.’

U. A. Fanthorpe, Rosie Bailey,
William Butler Yeats.
Not a place you’d visit daily.
U. A. Fanthorpe, Rosie Bailey,
Gravely, gaily, willow-waly,
Something resonates.
U. A. Fanthorpe, Rosie Bailey,
William Butler Yeats.

---

John Whitworth is one of those fattish, baldish, backward-looking, provincial poets in which England is so rich (perhaps too rich).  His ninth collection, Being the Bad Guy, was published by Peterloo in November 2007.  Les Murray likes it.  Good on him.  You might also consider Writing Poetry published by A & C Black, one of those how-to books; it has run to a second edition and is pretty good, though he (the poet) would say that, wouldn’t he?

Ezio Cardarelli

Ezio Cardarelli, Drumcliff (2003)

Freda Karpf

Dipped in Honey

Crazy drunk bees
and a Monarch butterfly
enter every piece of blue sky
I find in this city.

Thinking of you through the spin
of days and wings
I’ll allow myself these thoughts,
cut my hair,
and remember how I wanted you
while touching you.

There really aren’t any bees
just the thought that they are somewhere
creating a world out of pollen
fussing gold from the hair on their legs
musing in sweetness
tasting the work of the thoughtless moment

while I enter a New Year
thinking of my days that were
dipped in honey.

---

breathing in the sky

i was moving up the tree.

every limb was coated with dirt that the wind blew

so i had patches here and there

where my sweat didn't keep it off my body.

I was climbing through the shadows

just like I am when I'm thinking of her.

You don't always look up when you're climbing

but when you do, you see pieces of blue.

it feels like you're breathing in the sky.

---

imperfect twilight

leila tov, good evening
may the song that is night play
down the day for you,
may the sunset bloom like the evening rose
may the wind pull softly at your hair
and hold you like a reed
when the sky closes cover over the earth
may the dusk settle any unanswered thoughts
may you always be loved
if there is quiet, let there be quiet
if there is peace, let there be peace
may you sleep like cream floating on coffee
may you hear the crickets rhythm like a lullaby
may you smell summer in the bedding at night
may you know the call of owls is just a message
of imperfect twilight

---

Dear ____

I went through my flower phase in my forties.
Geologists admit that periods of time
have no certain start or finish.  Mine began
by falling in love with flowers,
those promises of color
peeking through the gate in the bud,
and those that opened into their own full bloom.
This spring I experienced a shift.
I wish I could tell you that it was a slow,
patient passion
that opened in me the way nasturtiums
finally show their heat in full summer.
I fell in love with a woman.
Not just in the spring but again this summer.
Apparently, I'm a non-stop begonia.
I've been searching for ways to write about the earth.
All of this could be related.  I don't know.
It's a new period for me.
But I have to confess, amidst all these
changes I'm beginning to feel a sense of belonging.

---

Neon love

my cool cool love
i know you'll always love me.
You must be true to your words.
I’ll orbit your theories,
a cool moon in your head
my love, my neon love.
Wading through summer nights
I thought about your taste your kiss
till you were reluctantly on schedule
and offered your lips
dead before dead
like a bird in a cat's mouth.
My fluorescent love,
my neon love,
your head a planetary wonder
spiraling away from love’s axis.
Your cool love, your neon love
so removed from your blood
even your eyes draw back into your head.

---

Freda Karpf writes about the dailies or things that make you feel crazy and sane in The Daily Neurotic. She’s at work on a book about the intersection of grief, coastal environmental issues and comic revenge. Her Conversations with Nic is a multi-genre comic epic through the land of withdrawal.

Betty Parsons

Betty Parsons, Autumn (1965)

Rachel Hadas

Mars and Venus
(Botticelli, ca. 1475)

Gold tape gently billowing with her breathing,
triple V’s at bosom and sleeve and ankle
point to partings, leading the eye to where her
          body emerges.

Wait: This painting is an enormous V-ness.
Look how unemphatically, almost absent-
ly her left hand seems to be plucking one more
          labial gilded

entry between her waist and her knee. Reclining,
she becomes a series of languid valleys
who herself creates an entire other
          landscape of V-ness

in her consort. Slumbering, numb, the war-god—
head thrown back; neck, shoulders, torso open—
seems oblivious equally to the lady
          and to the satyrs,

naughty toddlers, trying on Mars’s helmet,
blowing conches into his ear, or crawling
gleefully through his corselet, their behavior
          an awful nuisance

all for nothing. Here in this vague green valley
lamb and lion, love and war are united
by indifference equally to these babies
          and to each other.

Do the little faunlets call Mars their Daddy?
Either way, his answer is not forthcoming.
Drained by amorous combat, the god is elsewhere.
          Vigilant Venus

gazes, not at him, nor at us, but rather
seems the merest eyeflick away from over-
seeing Sandro putting the final touches
          onto his family

portrait: Mars and Venus, it’s called. Or Father
sleeps while Mother’s keeping a watchful eye out
not on the children (are these the couple’s children?)
          but beyond; elsewhere.

Violence sleeps. Desire is in need of further
sustenance: her V’s are unfilled, her fingers
seem to press, to promise, half hiding, showing
          translucent treasures

he has seen and savored to satisfaction.
Rhyming, secret, intimate, and familiar,
their two mysteries mingle in this: deferral
          of ever after.

---

Pomology

Sappho, of the numberless kinds of apples
we have two, and one of them ripens early,
striped with sweetness, fragrant and lambent, by mid-
          August already

falling even on utterly windless days in-
to high grasses, ditches, to lie, wet, rosy,
partly hidden, bluejay-pecked, squirrel-nibbled,
          crawled through by hornets


like the apricot jam on the cafe table
where I sit now, back in the city. Autumn
haze; cathedral. I witness parents, children
          kiss, tug at parting.


Hard to separate cleanly! Our other apples
cling to the branches. Pick them—you clutch at twigs and
leaves, or just as likely you find that you are
          hoisted and dangling

from the bough. So that by late September,
when the soft fruit long has let go and fallen,
the stern tough tree’s loaded with glossy apples,
          hard, dry, and woody

to the tooth; to the eye, globed, rosy beauties.
All the pitiful few we could reach we’ve picked, but
seen from the roadside the tree is untouched, a virgin
          beaming sheer ripeness.

---

Rachel Hadas is the Board of Governors Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University and the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and criticism.  She coedited THE GREEK POETS: HOMER TO THE PRESENT (Norton 2009), an anthology of greek poetry in translation, and her latest book of poems is THE ACHE OF APPETITE (Copper Beech Press 2010).  A prose work is coming entitled STRANGE RELATION: A MEMOIR OF MARRIAGE, DEMENTIA, AND POETRY (Paul Dry Books 2011). “Mars and Venus” first published in THE EMPTY BED (1995); “Pomology” first published in HALFWAY DOWN THE HALL (1998)

Botticelli

Botticelli, Mars and Venus (c. 1475)

Eleanor Lerman

Beloved

On a steel morning, when the sky is full of wreckage
When it offers a wrecked moon, light seeping from
         the void like gas
you are thrown from your bed again
         by one of those dreams
Arms as thin as paper, shoes a poor excuse,
you shuffle down the boulevards, the ruined lanes
where what is left was finally scattered:
         roses, opals, broken stars
But remember that you have been warned:
keep your head low, your mouth shut
No one has to know that you are as ready
         as you will ever be
Perhaps the city will not forgive you but
         we will, we will

Beloved, yes, it is more than mysterious
Yes, how long we have been waiting
for someone to remember who we are

---

Storm Country

Buckets of water, baby pails, tall golden glasses,
         streams, oceans,
a wet world, wet tickets, wet white chalk
on streaky slate imagines that
         we have a destination:
we are going north, we are going east,
we are going, we are going, in our rain hats,
in our difficult days. Medicine in our pockets,
         books in our bags,
pens and paper and pictures of the time

when we first woke up in the gray light
         with no more work to do
Thus are we off to the Maritimes, the Keys,
to Santa Fe or Vera Cruz. To the sun,
the pole or the equator, or maybe to the land
          of our dreamy dreams.
But what if all that happens is we exhaust ourselves
by cleaning out the downspouts, jumping over
puddles before we manage even a single mile?

Still will I buy you oranges at the station
A magazine, an airmail stamp, the paperback
         memoir of a spy
Why not? I always knew that this was dangerous,
that even if we put our heads down and made it
         through the years,
finally, there would come a rainy summer
when we would have to shut up the house,

and leave behind the girls we were, kissing in
         the hallway,
to follow the thunder and the lightning
         into the storm country
where even lesser weather must be faced
with courage, and face it: love like a locket
          tossed into the hurricane,
love like the wind that travels everywhere,
         that fights on, that holds out,
that when it’s old enough, will win

---

Eleanor Lerman is the author of two short story collections and five books of poetry, most recently, The Sensual World Re-Emerges from Sarabande Books. She has been nominated for a National Book Award, received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won the 2006 Lenore Marshall Prize for the year’s best book of poetry.

Romaine Brooks

Romaine Brooks, Femme Avec Des Fleurs (1912)

A.E. Stallings

. . . in Love and War
after Sappho

Some say the thing of greatest worth
Upon the black face of the earth
Is a mighty troop of horse
Or foot, or ships in force.

I say it’s none of the above:
I say it is the one you love.
But this is obvious to all
Who have been in thrall.

Take Helen—loveliest disaster—
Jilted her fine lord and master
And sailed to Troy across the water,
No thought for parents, daughter,

Once Aphrodite lit the fire
And enlisted her desire.
So Anaktoria, far away,
Haunts my thoughts today:

Her graceful stride and shining face
I set in a higher place
Than infantry in ranks and ranks
And all the armored tanks.

---

Minutes

Minutes swarm by, holding their dirty hands out,
Begging change, loose coins of your spare attention.
No one has the currency for them always;
Most go unnoticed.

Some are selling packets of paper tissues,
Some sell thyme they found growing wild on hillsides,
Some will offer shreds of accordion music,
Sad and nostalgic.

Some have only cards with implausible stories,
Badly spelled in rickety, limping letters,
“Help me--deaf, etcetera--one of seven
Brothers and sisters.”

Others still accost the conspicuous lovers,
Plying flowers looted from cemeteries,
Buds already wilting, though filched from Tuesday’s
Sumptuous funeral.

Who’s to say which one of them finally snags you,
One you will remember from all that pass you,
One that makes you fish through your cluttered pockets,
Costing you something:

Maybe it’s the girl with the funeral roses,
Five more left, her last, and you buy the whole lot,
Watching her run skipping away, work over,
Into the darkness;

Maybe it’s the boy with the flute he fashioned
Out of plastic straws, and his strident singing,
Snatches from a melody in a language
No one can teach you.

---

After Sappho

Hesperus, you reunite
What dawn divides from one another—
The businessman and the suburb,
The couple and their chronic argument,
The toddler in daycare with his frazzled mother.

---

A. E. (Alicia) Stallings studied classics in Athens, Georgia and has lived since 1999 in Athens, Greece. She has published two books of poetry, Archaic Smile (1999), which won the Richard Wilbur Award, and Hapax (2006). Her verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things, was published by Penguin Classics. “After Sappho” first published in First Things; “Minutes” first published in Hapax; “...in Love and War” first published in Archaic Smile.

Brygos Painter

Brygos Painter, Vase, Athens (480–470 BCE)

Minnie Bruce Pratt

The Moon, Reading

The moon looks in our bedroom window at us
sometimes. As I lie down beside you she pulls
a silvery sheet over us, and then retreats
to her night-time reading, east to west.
Night after night that bright gaze moves over
us lying under the comfort of being watched over.

The round illuminated magnifying glass
in Mama’s hand as she passed into dementia
and understood less and less, her anxious eyes
reading the same line over and over. The moon
that shone in my window when I was little and
supposed to have religion, so I knelt and prayed
to that light, because she looked back at me.

Everything earthly and imperfect changes
under the moon. In this moment beside you
I am perfectly happy, lying in the moon light,
drifting slowly with you into illegible sleep.

---

The Place Lost and Gone, the Place Found

One low yellow light, the back room a cave,
musty sleeping bags, us huddled on the floor.
We pretend we’re camped somewhere with no calendar,
distant from morning when I will leave and leave
them motherless children again.   The oldest travels
into sleep, holds my hand while I listen, left,
to a huge wind come up in my hollow ears, my breath,
pain, and me asking:   What are we besides this pain,
this frail momentary clasp?
                                        At the window next day
the face of the youngest stiff with grief, and at my desk
beside me years after, his face, clear, fixed,
like a photo set in a paperweight, crystal heavy pain.
Pick it up, unable to put it down.
                                             Yet woven,
still twined in my hand, his sinewy fingers like twigs
in the tree we climbed the first day:
                                                      As soon as I jumped
from the car and hugged them, each a small oomph,
they rushed me to climb their tree, maple in the jumbled
wild green strip of land between houses and lawns,
up, feet there, there’s the nest, rumpled,
suspended.   They long for the hidden bird.   We talk
about what I can’t remember, nothing but words.   We drop
seeds into light, translucent silent whirligigs,
better than copters, they say, and gently rock
the branch I sit on with their long scratched legs.

They have asked me into their tree and, satisfied,
we sit rather large in its airy room.   Their house
slides away across the lawn to the edge.   Now
we are in the middle.   Now they show me the inside.
If I see a small grass motion, it’s probably voles.
That muddy excavation will be dug bigger, longer,
for a cave, for a hideout with a tin roof.   And all
paths, distinct or vague in the rank weeds, go
places.   The oldest leads me to his, a pond
sunk, hedged, and forgotten.   No one else comes.
He watches in the morning (silver), in the evening (gold).
For what?   For the birds, to be the one who sees
and takes the bird away, but only with his eyes.
The youngest boy takes me to the smallest creek.
We see the crawfish towers squiggled in the mud.
We see dim passageways down to hidden creatures,
mysteries.   We follow scarce water under a road
into sun.   They show me jewelweed, touch-me-not,
dangling red-orange tiny ears, and the brown pods,
how seed rattles and springs and scatters if you fling
out your hand, even carelessly.    They show me everything,
saying, with no words, they have thought of me here,
and here I am with them in the in-between places.


Minnie Bruce Pratt
Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

---

Minnie Bruce Pratt is posting poetry regularly on the web in her “Daily Drafts” on Facebook Notes and at mbpdailydrafts.blogspot.com. Most recently she has completed her forthcoming Inside the Money Machine with Nothing to Lose, poems about surviving under capitalism. Her selected poems, The Dirt She Ate, received a Lambda Literary Award. Some of her previous books include the poems of Walking Back Up Depot Street, the gender-boundary-crossing S/HE, and the award-winning Crime Against Nature. Reach her

Robert Giard

Minnie Bruce Pratt and Leslie Feinberg. Jersey City, NJ. (1993) Photo by Robert Giard. Courtesy of the Stephen Bulger Gallery.

Mary Kathryn Arnold

Christine

Ps. 69:33 “For the Lord heareth the poor, and
despiseth not his prisoners.”

They say they tie the knot differently
when they hang women. Something about
a quicker death. I brought my imprisoned

mistress a scarf of pongee to tie
round her neck, and a saveloy
to eat, her last meal. My calves were

pockmarked from the nettles I walked
through, the bucolic march on the
way to the jail. Half the crowd watched

her drop, but the other half had
bigger fish to fry. That half hissed
and opened their eyes wide as they

considered how a column shatters,
how many fragments can never equal
a life. They watched the pillar split,

a pure experiment, so far
from the danger across the street.

---

Naomi

Ruth 1:22 “So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess,
her daughter in law, with her, which returned out of the
country of Moab: and they came to Bethlehem in the
beginning of barley harvest.”

Shall I tell you a dogmatic
girl-meets-tractor tale? No, I think
a love story is better, as
Ruth loved Naomi. I can still

see her (but how to represent
the thing that I see?) riding in
a palanquin, atop an elephant.
Was that the miracle, that she

sat so high, that she satisfied
the need, or can we chalk it all
up to the discovery of grafting?
Maybe it was for the best that

we gazed at her from such a distance,
because she was not so different
from Helen, who, by the end of the war,
was an old and faded woman.

---

Mary Kathryn Arnold lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, The New Compass, Lesbian Quarterly, All Rights Reserved, Mezzo Cammin, and The Fiddlehead. In 1997, Rye Hill Press of Philadelphia, PA published her chapbook of poems, September Fruit. "Christine" and "Naomi" are part of her series Girls with Their Curls: A Mad Alphabet. She is the editor of Rhythm Poetry Magazine, Atlantic Canada's online venue for metrical verse.

Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott, Djuna Barnes, Paris (1926)

Ann Tweedy

Inside the Wreckage

after your anger, no door will open.
your anger, the door slammed
on me, on us. i recount your
leaving to myself, how you ripped your soul
away from mine while talking love--
abandoned me to ardent dreams
of your return. now my mind
is forbidden these dreams, but my body
doesn’t know. in sleep,
it takes you back, fully, wholly
without question. others tell me
of my moan-filled nights, how my hands
stroke my thighs as they tighten around you.
foolish body! i’m imprisoned here still, in this body
that loves you. in this house
whose door you slammed on me, on us.
was it because you couldn’t take
the loss that, months later, you made up
the story of my betrayal, then spat it out at me
as truth? your anger, a door slammed
on me, on us. may i remember the crush
of that door swinging wild-hinged

even as i walk around imprisoned
in my love for you, even,
even as i forgive.

---

Harbor

sometimes i can't help it
i'm down and i want to stay down
but then you hug me, your ample
breasts snug under my smaller
ones like an art sculpture
of a puzzle piece, and i feel
my spirits lift against my will
damn happiness i think, it's just
her breasts, they have nothing
to do with how things will turn
out between us, and i try not
to be pulled out of the treacherous
moment, out of the safety of
nothing can get worse than it
already is, but there i am, helpless,
elevated by your breasts

---

Over eighty poems of Ann Tweedy’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies, including Gertrude, Rattle, Damselfly Press, and Clackamas Literary Review, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook Beleaguered Oases is forthcoming from TcCreative Press in Los Angeles. Originally from Massachusetts, she currently divides her time between Skagit County, Washington and San Diego.

Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin, Cecilia de Madrazo and the Dog Coco (1915)

Elizabeth Oakes

To Sappho

No one will forget you again,
you with your large heart,
like the drum of the daughters,
like the hum of the mothers
as they create the sound
the world makes

All the church fathers
and all the puritans
and all the patriarchs
and all the witch hunters
couldn't destroy you

Once there was a poet,
women told themselves
for centuries,
and she was female,
and she fell
into the ocean,
and she is falling always,
which is really
what flying is all about

---

Elizabeth Oakes' new book is The Luminescence of All Things Emily, a series of poems about Emily Dickinson and her friends and family. Her first book, The Farmgirl Poems, won the 2004 Pearl Poetry Prize. She lives and writes in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Sedona, Arizona.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron, Sappho (1865)

Jan Steckel

Behind the Palisades

A Spanish hummingbird and I
staggered laughing over the cobblestones
clutching cut-glass cordial glasses of anisette
in Oxford May Day three in the morning.
Taste took me back twelve years
to a California canyon, filled with ferns.
How I chewed licorice in the green spray
of forbidden fennel for the first time,
running the ravine with you
and your sister, who burned herself ironing.
My mother wouldn’t let me lift an iron
until my bat mitzvah. You the awkward duckling
who swanned her way into a life of the mind,
butterflied into a fair physicist,
and I a physician. Now both of us crippled
out of our work, and the fennel grows higher
than our heads in this northern bay. You saw a flyer
I left in a bookstore, and we met (after thirty years)
in the library. Some secret stained
our tentative speech. You gave me a number
I never called. What happened to you
in the dry ravines and mica-glittering paths
of our childhood? What would I find
if I followed you home? For home was a
hollow of hurt burned worse than an iron,
and I ventured to England, to France and to Spain,
to stay away from that plain pain.

---

Pretending

My step-grandfather’s grandson
danced with my cousin at a Bar Mitzvah.
He held her too close and murmured
“We’re not really cousins, not by blood.”
“Let’s pretend we are,” she said,
inserting her elbow between them.

I’d been working for gay rights for years
before I worked up the nerve
to ask my grandmother to take me to the Castro.

“Where are you going?”
my step-grandfather called from the recliner.
“To Castro Street, dear.”
“What do you want to go THERE for?”
“To see fairies, dear,” trilled my grandmother,
and skipped out the door.

Her feet were so long,
she had to descend the basement stairs sideways.
Her shoulders were wide, her hips narrow.
She could pitch a baseball like a man,
had taught my father how to throw.

Her Mercedes launched like a torpedo
from the underground garage.

When we reached the Castro,
manly beauty sizzled. We held hands
to protect ourselves from glorious torsos,
spreading of feathers, the sheer display
of pierced and tattooed flesh
preening that day on the summer street.

I wondered if we looked like lesbians:
a baby dyke and her still-beautiful sugar-mama.

I pretended we were.

---

Metamorphosis

Not even heavy gilt frames
could make art of the nudes
on the Gold Club’s walls.

Light arrays framed the dancers:
vermilion, emerald and ultramarine.
Dry ice misted the stage.
Polychrome rays made flesh by fog
pulsated in time to Nine Inch Nails:
“I want to fuck you like an animal.”
Men gaped like apes
brutalized by Circe’s show.

Five-inch strands of gilded chain,
three strands to an earring,
brushed thin shoulders.
Her gray, dun and hunter green
camouflage bikini undulated to Prince:

“Hot thing, barely 21
Hot thing, looking for big fun….”

When she lost the camouflage,
she became a deer in the stage lights:
fragile legs, knees still knobby,
gracile breasts that actually looked real.

A disco version of Pink Floyd played
“Teacher, leave those kids alone.”
I thanked the gods for real breasts.
As I fell under the spell, the men
all changed back to humans.

On the way back to the car,
the pavement sparkled
like quartz beads in a girl’s hair.
The freeway was a river
of particulate light.

---

Jan Steckel's Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) won the Gertrude Press fiction chapbook award for LGBT writers. Her chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) won a Rainbow Award for lesbian and bisexual poetry. Her writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Find out more

Hew Wolff

Hew Wolff, Jan with Pink Elephants (2010)

Eileen Myles

An American Poem

I was born in Boston in
1949. I never wanted
this fact to be known, in
fact I’ve spent the better
half of my adult life
trying to sweep my early
years under the carpet
and have a life that
was clearly just mine
and independent of
the historic fate of
my family. Can you
imagine what it was
like to be one of them,
to be built like them,
to talk like them,
to have the benefits
of being born into such
a wealthy and powerful
American family. I went
to the best schools,
had all kinds of tutors
and trainers, traveled
widely, met the famous,
the controversial, and
the not-so-admirable
and I knew from
a very early age that
if there were ever any
possibility of escaping
the collective fate of this famous
Boston family I would
take that route and
I have. I hopped
on an Amtrak to New
York in the early
’70s and I guess
you could say
my hidden years
began. I thought
Well I’ll be a poet.
What could be more
foolish and obscure.
I became a lesbian.
Every woman in my
family looks like
a dyke but it’s really
stepping off the flag
when you become one.
While hiding this ignominious
pose I have seen and
I have learned and
I am beginning to think
there is no escaping
history. A woman I
am currently having an affair with said
You know you look
like a Kennedy. I felt
the blood rising in my
cheeks. People have
always laughed at
my Boston accent
confusing “large” for
“lodge,” “party”
for “potty.” But
when this unsuspecting
woman invoked for
the first time my
family name
I knew the jig
was up. Yes, I am,
I am a Kennedy.
My attempts to remain
obscure have not served
me well. Starting as
a humble poet I
quickly climbed to the
top of my profession
assuming a position of
leadership and honor.
It is right that a
woman should call
me out now. Yes,
I am a Kennedy.
and I await
your orders.
You are the New Americans.
The homeless are wandering
the streets of our nation’s
greatest city. Homeless
men with AIDS are among
them. Is that right?
That there are no homes
for the homeless, that
there is no free medical
help for these men. And women.
That they get the message
—as they are dying—
that this is not their home.
And how are your
teeth today? Can
you afford to fix them?
How high is your rent?
If art is the highest
and most honest form
of communication of
our times and the young
artist is no longer able
to move here to speak
to her time... Yes, I could,
but that was 15 years ago
and remember—as I must—
I am a Kennedy.
Shouldn’t we all be Kennedys?
This nation’s greatest city
is home of the business-
man and home of the
rich artist. People with
beautiful teeth who are not
on the streets. What shall
we do about this dilemma?
Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
what the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.
Am I alone tonight?
I don’t think so. Am I
the only one with bleeding gums
tonight? Am I the only
homosexual in this room
tonight? Am I the only
one whose friends have
died, are dying now?
And my art can’t
be supported until it is
gigantic, bigger than
everyone else’s, confirming
the audience’s feeling that they are
alone. That they alone
are good, deserved
to buy the tickets
to see this Art.
Are working,
are healthy, should
survive, and are
normal. Are you
normal tonight? Everyone
here, are we all normal?
It is not normal for
me to be a Kennedy.
But I am no longer
ashamed, no longer
alone. I am not
alone tonight because
we are all Kennedys.
And I am your President.

---

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1949, and moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. Her many volumes of poetry and fiction include Sorry, Tree; Chelsea Girls; Not Me; Skies; and Cool for You. Her most recent book is The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, published by Semiotext(e) in 2009. Inferno (a poet's novel) will be out in the fall.

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles

Judy Grahn

If you lose your lover

if you lose your lover
rain hurt you   blackbirds
brood over the sky trees
burn down everywhere brown
rabbits run under
car wheels   should your
body cry?   to feel such
blue and empty bed dont
bother   if you lose your
lover comb hair go here
or there get   another

---

I am the wall at the lip of the water

I am the wall at the lip of the water
I am the rock that refused to be battered
I am the dyke in the matter, the other
I am the wall with the womanly swagger
I am the dragon, the dangerous dagger
I am the bulldyke, the bulldagger

and I have been many a wicked grandmother
and I shall be many a wicked daughter.

---

Look at my hands

Look at my hands
they are apples
my breasts
are apples
my heart
is an apple tree

---

Judy Grahn teaches Women's Spirituality and Queer literature. Her most recent book of poems is love belongs to those who do the feeling from Red Hen Press.

Lynda Koolish

Lynda Koolish, Grahn (c. 1972)

Ali Liebegott

Grates and Bridges

Before I knew people could die of cancer
not just overdoses, but that adult diseases
loomed like humid clouds over every city
waiting for any random person to walk beneath them—

I was twenty-three years old and just moved
to New York with two hundred dollars and a puppy.
The first day I took the subway on my own
from Brooklyn to a temp job in Manhattan
I was so proud, arriving, the doors opening
and me forging through a mist of people.

I wanted to throw my arms over my head victoriously
and smile at every exhausted commuter
but no one was in the mood—I was in New York, after all.

This was long before 9/11—New York was falling apart
in a different way, newscasters would get in small motorboats
and go with engineers to the underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge
on exposés where their vessels rocked precariously in the waves
and they reached out and tore off giant chunks of concrete
from the base of the bridge like Sunday bread—
then held them up to the video camera in disgust.

I walked blocks to my temp job, quickly down the sidewalk,
with a coffee in my hand—the coffee was so sweet
going down my throat.  It was January.  Can you imagine?
Me in my too-big thrift store Navy band shoes I bought
to look professional and my dollar pants slipping down my thin waist.
When I think of New York, I think of being hungry,
with my whole hungry life in front of me.

I walked block after block across grates in the sidewalk
there were two kind of grates: one, a manhole with latticed bars,
a giant pie top, steaming in the street.

The other, a pair of giant metal doors that laid down
over staircases and basements, sometimes these doors
would be propped open like windows of an advent calendar
and a delivery person would run back and forth
to a double-parked van unloading large bags of flour
and giant drums of salad dressing to the bowels of a restaurant.

When I walked over these grates, if I stepped on the seam
where the two doors met, my foot dipped and stomach dropped
because I’d just read about someone in the New York Post
who’d fallen through a faulty grate and almost died.

They were rich now from a lawsuit and I worked at a temp job
where everyone was broke, the person who’d fallen through the grate
became the joke we made every day—we’d all rather fall than go to work.
We wanted to stomp so badly on the grates and land right into a mountain
of new hundred dollar bills in an accident lawyer’s office,
and when we walked around on our lunch break or Fridays
to the West Village Check Cashing place and traded our paychecks
for four hundred dollars in new twenty dollar bills
we felt rich—jumping on grates all the way to happy hour.

Sometimes when I jumped, I became a speck
falling through the pit in my own stomach.
Those grates are artifacts from a different era
when all my friends were junkies and I fell in love like shit heads do—
there were so many years before friends got sick
with adult things like cancer.  We didn’t know then
when we were jumping, the amazing luxury
of what it meant to stomp on something that couldn’t break yet.





link to video

---

Ali Liebegott currently lives in San Francisco. Her first book, The Beautifully Worthless, won the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction. She is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for Arts, and taught creative writing at UC San Diego. Her novel, The IHOP Papers, was awarded a Lambda Literary award for Women's Fiction, a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, and was a finalist for a Stonewall Prize. She is currently finishing an illustrated novel called "The Crumb People" about a post-September 11 obsessive duck feeder.

Amos Mac

Amos Mac, Ali Liebegott (2010)

Janet Kenny

Butterflies

Today is a day of butterflies but how can I
write of such things for people in cities, caught
in human closeness. If I ever thought
that they could care that all the air of my
garden is crowded with light uplifting
colour and whiteness, wafting, shifting,
I only need to remember the traffic clanking
and think of the feet on the pavement spanking,
clipping and shuffling, and voices merging,
decibels surging and iron screeching,
thumping and thudding and Muzak reaching
into the buildings where lovers are lunching,
people are buying and selling, munching
something in paper, and rushing and crossing,
pissing and bossing and talking and meeting:
I and my butterflies are retreating.
Once I was part of the clutter and clatter.
I mixed and I struggled and joined the chatter
and oh, how I loved it, the smells and the fashions,
the colour and movement, the joy and passion.
Here with the butterflies in my garden
I bless the living and ask their pardon.

---

Janet Kenny: Born in New Zealand, worked as singer in Britain, and in anti-nuclear-war politics and general publishing in Australia. Co-edited and wrote Beyond Chernobyl. Poems in The Book of Hope, joint chapbook with Jerry H. Jenkins. Poems in, among others, Umbrella, The Barefoot Muse, The Chimaera, Iambs and Trochees, The Raintown Review.

Auguste Renoir

Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876)

Sappho - Willis Barnstone

Return, Gongyla

Your lovely face.
When absent,
the pain of unpleasant
winter.

O Gongyla, my darling rose,
put on your milk-white gown. I want
you to come back quickly. For my
desire feeds on

your beauty. Each time I see your gown
I am made weak and happy. I too
blamed the Cyprus-born. Now I pray
she will not seek

revenge, and may she soon allow
you, Gongyla, to come to me
again: you whom of all women
I most desire.


Translation by Willis Barnstone

---

Βorn in Lewiston, Maine, Willis Barnstone was educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, Yale and the Sorbonne, and is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Some of his books are The Gnostic Bible, Life Watch, Algebra of Night: Selected Poems, The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets, and With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Airesz: A Memoir.

Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone, Sappho (2009)

Joan Annsfire

Distant Music

Life was a party I crashed clumsily,
a voyeur, a wallflower,
standing on the sidelines of weddings, births,
nearly everything that binds the social fabric.

A shy stranger in a room
full of other people’s friends,
my little plate of gender rolls
dipped in the bitter sauce of obligation;
small, wilted canapés on a tarnished platter.

I arrived with little more than my youth,
fleeing my shabby kitchen
that came alive at night,
its counters and floors awash in roaches;
it was there I prepared dinner
and plotted revolution.

Pesky relatives claimed a husband
could pull me out of squalor
but, to me, their stories were but cautionary tales,
peppered with maybes and should-have-beens.

They swore that I would rue the day
I walked out of their party
yet, I still savor the moment I opened
that fated door.

Beyond it lay an outcast’s world;
mountains of treasure scattered
in bright and jumbled piles,
a veritable carnival of disorder.

I heard a circus-song of odd harmonies
a merry-go-round of alternatives,
striking every chord in my imagination,
resounding, vibrating, seducing
with wild and discordant song.

As I listened every hair rose up
and stood at attention.

Moments later,
I found myself dancing.

---

Enemy

I was an enemy then,
embedded in their workplace,
my gender branding me as an interloper,
an alien from the other side.

Work hours passed in quiet isolation,
a drafter, I drew lines
mapping the nexus of water mains
beneath San Francisco streets,
a network no woman
had dared document before me.

I wore my resolve, like armor,
like an ammunition belt
draped over my shoulder.

Each morning I returned to the frontlines
and each evening glanced furtively
beneath my car before entering,
checking for a threat
I preferred not to name.

An object of ridicule,
I walked a tightrope of repressed anger,
basked in the reflected light
of feigned indifference.

My cubicle became my fortress
a place of quiet observation
from which I bore witness to every battle.

With prudence and caution
I horded my paychecks
and learned to love silence.

Yes, I was an enemy then,
a reluctant exile in my own skin;
barely three years had passed
before my pink-slip waved
like a white flag of surrender.

One last stark and brutal acknowledgement
that all my weapons were useless
and I'd finally lost
the war.

---

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Joan Annsfire has lived in the Bay Area for nearly thirty years. She now makes her home in Berkeley. Her work has appeared in these literary journals (among others): The Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom (many issues), The SoMa Literary Review, 13th Moon, Bridges, and The Evergreen Chronicles, as well as in the following anthologies: Queer Collection: Prose & Poetry 2007, The Cancer Poetry Project, The Other Side of the Postcard, Identity Envy, The Venomed Kiss, and Read These Lips.

Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait (1928)

Suzanne Gardinier

89

The vase of tower fragments and his mother’s
last dress made ashes the wind blows loose

How the rain reaches into the winter ground
and warms and turns the grasses loose

Walk on your knees says the guard to his father
Give me a name and I’ll turn you loose

The harbormaster’s hands in the morning
on the knots the night tides tried to pull loose

The peony petals pressed in round bud
then unfolding Your shirt’s pink Then falling loose

How the years found what she held so tightly
and took it Prying her fingers loose

Left in the tree he passed every day
A man The tatters of his clothes flapping loose

The smallness of the barbarians’ airplanes
after the emperor’s airplanes let loose

How he sat coughing shards of his nation’s hatred
How she wanted to keep him and he said Turn me loose

The meadow paddock by the intransigent
sea broken open and the horses run loose

She’s remembering your way with her bindings
Yrs bridled How you tighten How you cut them loose

---

Suzanne Gardinier is the author most recently of Iridium and Selected Poems, Dialogue with the Archipelago, and Today: 101 Ghazals. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.

R. Nemo Hill

R. Nemo Hill, Loosed (2010)

Ann Drysdale

Sailing to Lesbos
after Baudelaire
(I have been faithful to thee, Cythera, in my fashion…)

My heart was fraught with joy; free as a seagull
Zooming around in the rigging, while the ship
Frolicked like an inebriated angel,
Drunk on the sunshine.

What is that miserable-looking island?
Lesbos. The sacred isle they all sing about,
The sad old spinsters. See it for what it is –
Desolate country.

Place of sweet secrets, where true hearts celebrate,
And the essence of Sappho drifts like perfume
Over the ocean, breathing love and langour
Into our spirits.

Island of myrtle, land of full-blown roses,
Worshipped by everyone of our persuasion,
Where sighs of satisfaction rise like incense
Out of the flowers,

Or like the nonstop gurgling of turtledoves!
– Lesbos. Just a barren land torn by shrill cries.
A desert strewn with rocks among which I saw
Something astounding.

It was not a temple in a shady grove
Where the priestess, hot with a secret passion
Loosened her robe to stand before the breezes
Holding it open.

No; we saw – as we sailed so close to the shore
That the flapping sails sent the seabirds wheeling –
A gibbet like a black tree with three branches
High on the clifftop.

Greedy birds, perched on the meat they were eating,
Tore into the remains of a rotting corpse.
Using their beaks as filthy tools they dibbled
Into her crannies;

Her eyes were holes and from her plundered belly
The innards dangled onto her parted thighs.
Her torturers had pierced and desecrated
All that was woman.

Beneath her feet, four-legged, earthbound creatures
Gazed upwards, jealous, milling round one great beast
That loomed like a Lord High Executioner
Over its cronies.

Lesbian, born under a beautiful sky
You suffered these insults in silence, paying
For your bad adorations whose detractors
Left you unburied.

Poor dangling woman, all your griefs are my own.
I retched, feeling the bile rise behind my teeth
Connecting me with a running, far-reaching
River of sorrow.

Looking at you, poor creature, I felt again
All the old tooth-and-claw of my own nature
Tearing me into shreds, like crows and panthers
Killing me slowly.

The sky was delightful and the sea was smooth
But from that moment all seemed black and bloody
And I wrapped my heart in that allegory,
Shrouded forever.

All I found standing on your island, Sappho,
A black gibbet where my own image swivelled.
Steel me to look at my own heart and body
And not feel sickened.

---

Ann Drysdale lives in Old South Wales, UK, and has been a hill farmer, water-gypsy, gonzo journalist and single parent – not necessarily in that order. Her fifth volume of poetry, Quaintness and Other Offences, has recently joined a mixed list of published writing.

Theo Angelopoulos

Theo Angelopoulos, Voyage to Cythera, Greece (1984)

Joy Howard

Old Acquaintance

Lust    my old friend    where
are you?    I’ve thought I haven’t
needed you    in fact I’ve been thinking of you
as getting to be a bit of a tiresome nuisance
always popping round    and demanding a cup
of sugar    twist of salt    spoonful of honey
in fact I’ve rather begun to dread your knock
sending a small lurch through my pulse and into the pit
of my stomach

Once you used to make me feel alive
now you remind me I’m growing older    needing
my store cupboard filled with sweet preserves
especially in these days of tightening belts
with rationing upon us again

Getting down to it I’ve been quite angry with you
you’ve caused    a lot of trouble between
me and her    she doesn’t like you
finds you too insistent    too intense
I’ve had to bolt the door on you    not hear you
make you go away

Of course I miss you sometimes
as I hold her    soft and smelling of roses
but I’ve got to stop wanting to plunder
her shelves    empty her store or what with you
and me arriving after dark and into devouring everything
there’ll be nothing left for winter

But now that your perseverance has become
so faint and uninsistent    look what’s happening
I miss you    I want you
banging at my door like there’s no tomorrow
I want to sit you at my table    feast in abandon
fall to    like the nights were not
drawing in

It’s come to this    I think I owe you an apology
it doesn’t do to give up on old friends for
a lover    maybe in time she’ll grow to like you
so when you next come calling  (I’ll know it’s you)
I promise to be there    and please
would you make it soon

---

Joy Howard set up Grey Hen Press, with the aim of showcasing the work of older women, in 2007. She has been writing poetry for many years; her poems have featured in anthologies and magazines, and can be found online at Guardian Unlimited and poetry p f. Her collection Exit Moonshine was published in 2009.