ISSUE 2 - EPITHALAMION

CONTENTS

who run from love and moan
it flees from me
Cally Conan-Davies

Unfortunately, submissions of epithalamions for lesbians did not flood my inbox. How could they? Marriage is so new to us, we don’t even know what to call each other - wife? partner? spouse? lover? A few years ago, I was asked by a lesbian who got married in California to think of a word; here is my introduction to the word RAE. It hasn’t caught on yet; perhaps neologisms take time.

While historically, lesbians once enjoyed some freedom of affection in romantic friendships, the turn of the last century dealt a terrible blow to the possibility of lesbians spending their lives together. So while I had hoped to find poems for this issue celebrating lesbian marriage, the poems I received show lesbian (and gay) relationships in limbo, not quite in hell, not quite in heaven; still tormented, but with pockets of triumph.

The positive and negative sides of lesbian history have been rigorously investigated and clarified by Lillian Faderman in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. When lesbians like Renée Vivien were doomed to hell by the likes of Baudelaire, our love became a sickness we were “stricken with,” and if we survived, we became artists of “being lonely.” In this issue, Mike Alexander translates poems by Vivien and Baudelaire; Anna Evans envisions “Ivanhoe” with a lesbian slant; and Rose Kelleher shows compassion for “the awkward and unlovely.”

Descend, descend, lamentable victims,
descend the path of everlasting hell.
Baudelaire

You who judge me, for me you are nothing.
Renée Vivien

and I was stricken with a strange desire
Anna Evans

years / of practice in the art of being lonely
Rose Kelleher

Being a lesbian in the past century has been a terrible, bitter, humiliating struggle. Poems in this issue by Judith Rechter, Morgan Hunt, Flower Conroy, Marilyn Hacker, and Sarah Sarai express some of the torment of trying to live and love as a lesbian: endless searching, being unacceptable, bearing a stigma, losing hope, constant longing, and observing the institution of marriage from the outskirts.

I search every nook for your countenance
Judith Rechter

Was I bitter? Beyond! Beyond! Ridiculous
Morgan Hunt

The music of flies in gray gardens.
Flower Conroy

You’re gone, you said so.
Marilyn Hacker

My mood is London longing for a blue sky.
Sarah Sarai

Thanks to pioneering scholars, lesbians know so much more of our history, but we’re still outsiders in society, without our own wedding and marriage traditions. In this issue, Jane Cassady’s lovely poem lesbianizes wedding anniversary gifts; Alix Greenwood makes nature a beautiful lover; Minnie Bruce Pratt creates a special place in a lesbian bed; and despite all kinds of “vain travail,” R. Nemo Hill, Timothy Murphy, and Brooke Bailey offer glimpses of happiness.

Never mind the leather hearts that voted against us
Jane Cassady

The night is full of promise.
Alix Greenwood

Our ribs make a boat of the bed to carry us
Minnie Bruce Pratt

Late in a season whose sole warmth is you
R. Nemo Hill

My love (once such a darling) / is now a wintry spouse
Timothy Murphy

In my reign, this is still a place no man / has been.
Brooke Bailey

In this issue are four poets who understand the lavender sweetness of courtship and giving gifts. Gail White speaks in the voice of Sappho’s daughter; Eleanor Lerman gives us everything we’ll ever need; Caridad Moro lavishes gifts on Stacie; Shirley Pulido tosses the moon and accepts the sun; and Brian Carr, in my favorite translation of this poem by Sappho, captures a lesbian’s passion unsullied by centuries of hateful discrimination.

they fan it with their kisses and their eyes,
letters and sweet words and honeyed looks
Gail White

Ribbons of / light, ribbons of clouds: all this is for you.
Eleanor Lerman

the essence of French lavender in a cobalt decanter for your vanity
Caridad Moro

When Moon spilled silver on my head
Shirley Pulido

Didn’t like the gifts? Then she’ll give them.
Sappho

It was extremely exciting “matchmaking” art with the poems. Thanks to Birthe Havmøller for her treasure-trove of Feminine Moments, and to lesbian artists Cassandra Langer, Anna-Stina Treumund, Louise Fishman, Irit Rabinowits, Carrie Moyer, Liz Ashburn, Sarah Lucas, Emily Roysdon, Leslie Satterfield, Rolande, Jemma Watts, Lydia Daniller, Vivienne Harrison, and Daisy Eneix for their dazzling contributions, which became an art show in itself for Issue 2. I love all this art, but Lydia Daniller’s portrait of a lesbian wedding is a miraculous vision of epithalamion.

Please click on the Contents link below and take a close look at the poetry and art. From U.A. Fanthorpe's “Idyll” in this issue:

Maybe, heaven. Or maybe
We can get so far in this world. I’ll believe we can.

This issue is dedicated to my muse, Lillian Faderman, who more than anyone, shows us how to love ourselves and each other.

Best wishes,
Mary Meriam, Editor
December, 2010

ISSUE 2 - EPITHALAMION - CONTENTS

POETRY

ART

U.A. FANTHORPE Idyll RENEE VIVIEN - MIKE ALEXANDER Sappho’s Disdain Dédain de Psappha BAUDELAIRE - MIKE ALEXANDER Damned Women ANNA EVANS Torquilstone ROSE KELLEHER Compensation MINNIE BRUCE PRATT The Wood Thrush Sings JUDITH RECHTER Molly’s Rebuttal TIMOTHY MURPHY Jasper Lake Conestoga Bark Cold Front MARILYN HACKER Lettera amorosa R. NEMO HILL From A Man To The Youth He Loves GAIL WHITE Cleis ALIX GREENWOOD Words of Love FLOWER CONROY Ninth Grade Physical Education MORGAN HUNT The Origin of Ambergris BROOKE BAILEY The Divorce Bed ELEANOR LERMAN For the Stay-At-Home Wife Carrara: The Sculptor Speaks JANE CASSADY Love Poem with Traditional Anniversary Gifts CARIDAD MORO Contemplation of a Name SARAH SARAI Longing for a Blue Sky SHIRLEY PULIDO Silver and Gold CALLY CONAN-DAVIES I Need Men SAPPHO TRANSLATED BY BRIAN CARR Love and the Trick-Stitching Child

ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI Self Portrait as a Lute Player  (1616-1618) RENEE VIVIEN 1877-1909 SARAH LUCAS Eating a Banana (1990) IVANHOE Joan Fontaine & Elizabeth Taylor CASSANDRA LANGER LIZ ASHBURN Lesbian Sonnet - Garden CLAUDE CAHUN Self portrait (in cupboard), c. 1932 TIMOTHY MURPHY & ALAN SULLIVAN CARRIE MOYER Affiche #13 (Louis Unfurled), 2003 R. NEMO HILL Julian Mendez Perea ANNE SEXTON VIVIENNE HARRISON Forest 17 (2008) ANNA-STINA TREUMUND Rehearsal for my wedding LOUISE FISHMAN Sea (1995) JEMMA WATTS Fish 1 (2007) IRIT RABINOWITS Untitled/1997 LYDIA DANILLER Lesbian Wedding ROLANDE Le Souper Galant II (1979) EMILY ROYSDON The Piers Untitled (#2), 2010 DAISY ENEIX Moon Toss (2008) IMOGENE CUNNINGHAM The Dream (1910) LESLIE SATTERFIELD I thought she was mine (2), 2008

U.A. Fanthorpe

Idyll

Not knowing even that we’re on the way,
Until suddenly we’re there. How shall we know?

There will be blackbirds, in a late March evening,
Blur of woodsmoke, whisky in grand glasses,

A poem of yours, waiting to be read; and one of mine;
A reflective bitch, a cat materialised

On a knee. All fears of present and future
Will be over, all guilt forgiven.

Maybe, heaven. Or maybe
We can get so far in this world. I’ll believe we can.

---

Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as a Lute Player  (1616-1618)

Renée Vivien - Mike Alexander

Sappho’s Disdain

You who judge me, for me you are nothing.
I have contemplated the infinite shadows.
I have neither the vanity of your flowers, nor
Fear of your slander.

You can hardly tarnish the piety
Of my passion for the beauty of women,
Changeable as the sunsets of summer,
Rivers, or fires.

Nothing can sully the stunning faces
Brushed by my breath & my broken singing,
Like a statue standing amid the passing,
Soul all serenity.


Translated by Mike Alexander

---

Dédain de Psappha

Vous qui me jugez, vous n’êtes rien pour moi.
J’ai trop contemplé les ombres infinies.
Je n’ai point l’orgueil de vos fleurs, ni l’effroi
De vos calomnies.

Vous ne saurez point ternir la pitié
De ma passion pour la beauté des femmes,
Changeantes ainsi que les couchants d’été,
Les flots et les flammes.

Rien ne souillera les fronts éblouissants
Que frôlent mes chants brisés et mon haleine.
Comme une Statue au milieu des passants,
J’ai l’âme sereine.


Translated by Mike Alexander

---

Seven Towers Ltd will publish Mike Alexander's first full-length collection, The Necessary Slice, in 2012. His chapbook, We Internet in Different Voices (Modern Metrics), is available through EXOT books. His poems have appeared in River Styx, Borderlands, Bateau, Abridged, Barefoot Muse, Shit Creek Review, Raintown Review & other journals. He has recently joined the board of Mutabilis Press.

Renée Vivien

Renée Vivien

Baudelaire - Mike Alexander

Damned Women

By guttering lamplight’s wan rays
over cushions pregnant with fragrance,
Hippolyta mused on the forceful embrace
that had lifted the curtain of her innocence.

Her eye, tempest-troubled, she sought
naiveté’s already distant sky,
as a traveler turns his head to plot
blue horizons that have passed away.

Her defeated stupor, her dreary splendor,
eyes awash with wearied tears, arms
tossed wide like empty weapons in surrender,
all aided, all adorned her fragile charms.

Sprawled at her feet, calm, full of joy,
Delphine beamed ardently from underneath,
a strong animal keeping watch on her prey,
after having marked her with her teeth.

Strong beauty on her knees before the frail,
superb, she stretched voluptuously, & sniffed
the wine of her triumph, deigning to kneel
as if to pluck a sweet thank-you gift.

In her pale victim’s eye, she pursued
the mute canticle of pleasure’s cry
& the sublime, the infinite gratitude
that parts the eyelids like a sigh.

“Hippolyta, say what this arouses.
Understand now, one must not offer
the sacred holocaust of your first roses
to be scourged by a breath much rougher?

“My kisses are ephemeral as those of evening
mayflies caressing great transparent lakes
while those of your lover would carve, harrowing
like chariots or plowshares, their stakes;

“They’ll trample over you as pitiless
as a harnessing of horse or hoofed calf,
Hippolyta, my sister, turn your face,
My soul, my all, my all, my other half.

“Turn to me your azure eyes full of stars,
for one of those charming looks, a godsend,
I’ll raise the veil on yet more hidden pleasures,
& lull you to dream a dream without end.”

But Hippolyta then, lifting her young head:
“I do not repent, I am not ungrateful,
my Delphine, I suffer, & am disquieted,
as after a terrible, nocturnal meal.

“I feel a frightful weight in fast pursuit,
black troops of scattered phantoms sweeping down
to carry me away by a shifting route,
cut off from all else by bloody horizon.

“Have we done something so pestilential?
Explain, if you can, my fright & my distress:
I tremble whenever you call me your angel,
my mouth moving all the while toward your kiss.

“Don’t look at me that way, my dearest wish,
I love you, my sister, by my own volition,
even if you had been set for me in ambush,
the beginnings of my perdition.”

Delphine, shaking her curls with a tragic poise,
& as if stomping on an iron pedestal,
answered with fatal glare & despotic voice,
“Who dares before Love to speak of hell?

“Cursed be whatever useless idiot
first decided in his stupidity,
enamoured of an unanswerable knot,
to confuse the affairs of love with morality.

“He who wants to join in one mystic form,
shadow with heat, night with day, it is enough,
that he will never, in his paralysis, warm
his body by that red sun we call love.

“Go, find yourself a mindless fiancé,
offer to his cruel kiss your virgin heart,
you’ll return to me, remorseful, grey,
& stigmatized, breast torn apart.

“One can satisfy but one master, down here.”
But the child, venting her boundless miseries,
cried suddenly, “My soul, I feel widening there
a yawning abyss; my heart is that abyss.

“A volcano burning, deep as the void, accursed!
that groaning monstrosity nothing could
assuage, nor ever quench that Fury’s thirst
which, torch in hand, burns within the blood.

Let us close the curtains against all else,
let weariness at long last bring us rest.
let me in your embrace say my farewells,
& find the grave’s coolness at your breast.”

Descend, descend, lamentable victims,
descend the path of everlasting hell.
plunge to the deepest pit where all crimes,
flagellated by an unholy gale,

all helter-skelter, stormily rummage.
Mad shades, dash toward the end you treasure;
yet nothing you find shall assuage your rage,
& your punishment shall be born of your pleasure.

No sunshine shall ever brighten your caverns;
through vents in the cave walls, feverish fumes
shall filter like so many flaming lanterns
& lance your bodies with frightful perfumes.

Your orgasm’s bitter sterility
shall parch your throat as it toughens your skin,
& the fury-bound gusts of carnality
lash your flesh, like a flag, old & thin.

Far from the living, wanderers, criminals,
across desert wastes you course like wolves;
obey your destiny, disheveled souls,
fly the Infinite you carry in yourselves.


Translated by Mike Alexander

---

Seven Towers Ltd will publish Mike Alexander's first full-length collection, The Necessary Slice, in 2012. His chapbook, We Internet in Different Voices (Modern Metrics), is available through EXOT books. His poems have appeared in River Styx, Borderlands, Bateau, Abridged, Barefoot Muse, Shit Creek Review, Raintown Review & other journals. He has recently joined the board of Mutabilis Press.

Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas, "Eating a Banana" (1990). Copyright Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Anna Evans

Torquilstone

I knelt before you in the woodland dirt,
Rowena, and my first thought was of him,
but when I raised my head to kiss your skirt,
beside your beauty Ivanhoe’s grew dim,

and I was stricken with a strange desire
to trail my kisses from your ankle bone
up to your knee, then rising, ever higher.
I backed away, appalled at what I’d shown.

In fact I had shown nothing. No one knew
from that day he was silver, you were gold,
and everything I did, I did for you,
so you would have the man you wished to hold.

When for myself I was not held by any
man or woman after, could not bear
another’s touch, despite the suit of many
and Isaac’s desperation for an heir.

So if I frowned to see you at his side,
and if my fingers dug into my jewels,
my jealousy was of him, for his bride,
my sadness for the spider’s web of rules

that would not let me tell you what I wanted—
my black curls mingling with your golden yellow:
a secret that you never knew, which haunted
me every night upon my lonely pillow.

Some men protest, on reading of his life,
he got it wrong: the brunette not the fair
Rowena would have made a better wife.
For whom? And this was never over hair.

---

Anna Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, the Atlanta Review, Rattle and 32 Poems. She has been nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for both the 2005 and 2007 Howard Nemerov sonnet award, and for the 2007 Willis Barnstone Translation Award. She is Editor of The Raintown Review and of the formal poetry e-zine Barefoot Muse. She gained her MFA from Bennington College and her chapbooks Swimming and Selected Sonnets are available from Maverick Duck Press.

Ivanhoe

Joan Fontaine (Rowena) & Elizabeth Taylor (Rebecca) in Ivanhoe (1952)

Rose Kelleher

Compensation

The blind can hear things other people can’t,
one sense allowed to cover for the other
as if some slipshod god were keeping count,
half-trying to be fair. I know I’d rather
have seeing eyes than echometric ears,

but then, I know the awkward and unlovely
acquire fantastic powers after years
of practice in the art of being lonely;
conjuring wine from water, bread from stone,
wringing pleasures from the empty air
you with your luck in love could not imagine;

blessed―like saints in furnaces, withstanding
heat that would burn beauty to the bone―
with gifts they didn’t ask for, and can’t share.

---

Rose Kelleher is the author of Bundle o' Tinder (Waywiser, 2008). Her poems have appeared in many print and online journals, most recently 32 Poems, The Raintown Review and River Styx. She lives in Maryland.

Cassandra Langer

Cassandra Langer

Minnie Bruce Pratt

The Wood Thrush Sings

A poem for those burdened, and wakeful at night―

At the end of day, at the beginning of night
you lift the bed covers so I can climb in by.
The bed is a cave, the sheets cool as limestone
except where you’ve warmed the warp and weft.
The bed is a nest we fold ourselves into, belly
to back, knee to kneefold, wristbone to bone.
Our ribs make a boat of the bed to carry us
to a land of dreams, to what will happen next.

At 3 am I wake up, maybe the IRS, the taxes,
or room after room unpacking hundreds of boxes.
If I put each thing in its place, there will be
a place for the boat to land where the clock
doesn’t tick, where the body is unlocked
from pain, where the wood thrush sings after rain.


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

---

Minnie Bruce Pratt 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

Liz Ashburn

Liz Ashburn, Lesbian Sonnet - Garden

Judith Rechter

Molly’s Rebuttal

I’m such a passive horsemeat-eating bitch in the closet.
After you left me in the glop of betrayal I became
impervious. I had to find out how to turn off the gas
in an emergency, use the wrench already stolen.
Still life insists—my bones bend eagerly,
I search every nook for your countenance
connected like raindrops in a barrel.

I plan another trip to kingdom come.
The knots are hanging here, but hope resists.
I’m the chauffeur voyeur gawking
into the limousine, discovering how humans
are fleshed out, their mousey intentions,
skeletons garnished in pretty rags—I’m
aware of how they kiss and when they won’t.

---

Judith Rechter's poems have appeared in No More Masks, Perspective, Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry & Prose, Sinister Wisdom, and What I Want From You, an East Bay Anthology. Her first collection of poems, Wild West, was published by RAW ArT PRESS. She lives in California.

Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun, Self portrait (in cupboard), c. 1932

Timothy Murphy

Jasper Lake

Perched on a granite peak
where golden eagles shriek
my love and I peer down,
watching the Rockies drown—
crag and evergreen
sunk in aquamarine.
Over the lake last night
speckled trout took flight,
leaping the mirrored moon.
Now in the warmth of noon
gullied glaciers groan,
pouring silt and stone
into the seething streams.
Brief! Brief! a marmot screams,
diving under the scree
as its mountain heads for the sea.

---

Conestoga Bark

My mate feathers the spindled wheel
to right our tipsy bark,
luffing to windward as we heel
rail under in the dark.

Where boys are brown and salt air sweet,
seafarers find no rest
but wake aground in the waving wheat
that runs forever west.

---

Cold Front

For want of oil a moaning
comes from the weathervane—
spindle and socket groaning
as north winds blow again
and send the real geese flying
to Texas or Mexico.
Our brass goose is dying
to join them, but cannot go.

Here firewood is essential
for keeping folks alive.
Where windchill’s exponential
only the snowmen thrive.
Someday we’ll board a clipper
and catch a Norther bound
south from the Little Dipper
for Virgin Gorda Sound.

My love (once such a darling)
is now a wintry spouse,
sullen—sometimes snarling—
because I’m a lying souse,
because I can’t quit tippling
or spirit us from the snow—
or be the winsome stripling
he wooed so long ago.

---

Timothy Murphy farmed and still hunts in the Dakotas. "Jasper Lake" was first published in The Deed of Gift (Story Line Press, 1998); "Conestoga Bark" was first published in Chimaera; "Cold Front" was first published in The Hudson Review.

Timothy Murphy and Alan Sullivan

Alan Sullivan (l) and Timothy Murphy (r) in the 1970s. Thanks to Julian Mendez Perea for his photo-wizardry.

Marilyn Hacker

Lettera amorosa

Where’s the “you” to whom I might write a letter ?
There are dozens, none is the « thou » I never
did engage in dialogue: was I talking
to myself, loudly ?

You, your lion’s mane and your pale-rimmed glasses,
buccaneering over the swells of panic,
settled now, with a child, career and spouse in
lower Manhattan?

You, who picked the riverbank where we often
told our days with coffee at almost-twilight
to announce irrevocable departure ?
You’re gone, you said so.

You, but who are you, if I never met you,
man or woman, mother-tongue French or English
(maybe Arabic), you’re a word, a nameless
presence, night-fancied.

Letter, then, to light, which is open-ended,
folds, expands, but even on winter mornings
faithfully attends to the correspondence,
answers the question.

---

Marilyn Hacker, born in New York, used to live between New York and Paris, but has now made Paris her home. She’s the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names, out last year from Norton, and of ten collections of poems translated from the French, including Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss 2008)― by a French poet who grew up in Viet Nam and Africa―, and the Franco-Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Nettles (Graywolf, 2008). A collection of literary essays, Unauthorized Voices, was published by the University of Michigan Press―in the majority, essays on women poets, including Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, Marilyn Nelson, Julia Randall, and June Jordan.

Carrie Moyer

Carrie Moyer, Affiche #13 (Louis Unfurled), 2003

R. Nemo Hill

From A Man To The Youth He Loves

You say my eyes, receiving winter roses,
tried both to hide and tell you what they knew.
This bright banked fire, which flares out and then closes,
this spark my lowered gaze cannot subdue—
recall the course of blossoms brought indoors,
this pale bouquet of orange meteors.

Late in a season whose sole warmth is you
I watch them flame and fade, without regret.
My gaze is level now. I know it’s true
that this one bud which wilts, unopened yet,
may prove to be the promise of all pleasure—
of our two hearts, a constant common measure.

You say my eyes, receiving winter roses,
tried both to hide and tell you what we knew
already—that a fire there reposes,
late in a season whose bright spark is you.
Like the embers of those orange winter roses,
my gaze is level now. I know what’s true.


(for Julian—2007)

---

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

Julian Mendez Perea. Photo by R. Nemo Hill

Gail White

Cleis

Why is my mother not like other women?
I have seen other mothers with their girls
walk on the narrow cliffs above the sea
or in the pleasant fields to gather flowers,
and I have felt between them the calm peace
that comes of understanding.
                                                 But my mother―
if I should bring her handfuls of bright flowers
fresher than gold, sometimes she kneels and takes
me in her arms and holds me close as if
there were some threat to tear me from her heart
and her eyes glow with tears, as if a flower
were something she might never see again...
and other times, let me do what I will,
she walks as if her mind and eyes were gone
into the sea, a thousand miles away,
and I were not her child but some strange creature
she never knew, as if I were not there...

Is it misfortune to be such a child
with such a mother? Is it happier
to be always calm and close and intimate,
than to be captured in her sudden storms
and sent away out of her vacancies?
But would I change ― am I not happier
being always somewhat lonely for her love?
Girls who have lovers say that their delight
is the uncertainty of keeping love;
still to be watchful that it never goes―
they fan it with their kisses and their eyes,
with letters and sweet words and honeyed looks,
that the bright flame die not in the heart’s lamp―
and so my mother is, and I with her―
seeking assurance, still somewhat afraid
rejection and not love will be the end―
yet always in the end being reconciled.

When she comes in now, and she finds me writing,
what will she say? And if I interest her,
how will I answer, or how much be hurt
to be ignored? These questions lovers ask.
And those who love a mother do so too.

---

Gail White is the author of The Accidental Cynic (a winner of the Anita Dorn Memorial Award for Poetry), and Easy Marks (a nominee for the Poet’s Prize). She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton and her daughter

Alix Greenwood

Words of Love

The night is full of promise
(How familiar these words are).
Crickets sing their enchantments.
The evening star shines high and steady,
And later comes the moon.
They tread their radiant way, east to west.
(How often these words have been spoken.)
Oh, the powerful magic of this,
This endless moving from day through night.
Oh, how you are loved,
In numberless languages and ways
And places and times.
And these words of love are written on my soul:
The promise of the night―the evening star―
The radiance of the moon―the dawn, the dusk.

I will die, and my life will have been spent
Sometimes, too often, in sorrow, fear and boredom.
But it will have held you―
The changing light, the crickets, the shapes of trees at dusk.
And sometimes, not often, I know that is enough.

Oh, do not hurt my beloved.
Do not march across her
With your wars and weed-whackers,
Your tanks, your bulldozers, your bugspray.
Do not send weapons
Across her beautiful sky
Where only the constellations should travel.
Listen to her promise,
Observe her mysteries,
Give her your words of love.
It is enough.

---

Alix Greenwood writes: I am a white, middle-class British Lesbian, born 1963, now living in the US. "Words of Love" was written in October 2003. My ability to write poetry ebbs & flows ; I've just gone through a 5-year dry patch but am glad to say a few poems have trickled through recently

Vivienne Harrison

Vivienne Harrison, Forest 17 (2008)

Flower Conroy

Ninth Grade Physical Education

I startled myself staring at the backs
of her burnt butter legs.  That area below
cotton underwear.  Her tailbone’s dip.

The sway of highlighted hair between shoulder
blades.  My teacup mouth, porcelain saucer face.
Brain say suckable.  But hear the echo

of succulent.  Relent.  Golden vegetables bruised
with overripeness.  The music of flies in gray gardens.
Chemical pool smell of the locker room embarrassed

me out of that fleshy, cannibal daydream.
When the dashing quarterback pulled my pants down
in the middle of the gymnasium, unprovoked

in my mind, I wanted to kick the sunuvabitch
in his nut sac.  I stood there like a dumb
statue.  Not the pretty kind; not the Venus.

---

Flower Conroy’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in: American Literary Review; Serving House Journal; Psychic Meatloaf; Sweet; Saw Palm; Blaze VOX; The Battered Suitcase and other journals. She will be attending Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program in January 2011. Ms. Conroy currently lives in Key West, Florida.

Anna-Stina Treumund

Anna-Stina Treumund, Rehearsal for my wedding

Morgan Hunt

The Origin of Ambergris

Have you ever watched the sun singe the sea?
Seen steam rise in fierce nebulae over foam?
Such vistas, my lonely prerogative and
rare, since Poseidon imprisoned me.
 
She shimmered her secrets into my arms.
Yes, I knew the Old Roar had seen her first
but the viscous sensuousness of her kiss
glued me beyond fear of the sea-god’s power.

He was not inclined to share our mutual cynosure.
With one tine of his trident, he pared my soul from
body and drew it through a skein of horror:
I choose to forget all how and where.
 
Alone in the great dismal gray, confined to salt
and glare, I swam for years with chilblained heart,
surfacing to spout and breathe without
purpose, circumnavigating uncharted hurt.

Was I bitter? Beyond! Beyond! Ridiculous,
these phalanges permanently gloved within a
flipper! This rib cage deadened to buoyancy of
hope. Beyond. I am a monstrosity, yes.

But even a monster can love. Memories of
our passion began to purge my bitter bile.
With each dire release, the mess would float
atop the waves, awaiting alchemy of sun’s
 
sanctification and brine’s blessing.  Stars sang
lullabies to the flotsam, such dulcet mystery.
One day the lump washed ashore, where lovers learned
its limbic force and melded in most ancient dance.
 
Who underwent the greater change?  I wonder.
Me, a man confined to whale, or bezoar become
myrrh d’amour? I do know this: if yet she lives,
she’ll fathom my longing in the scent of ambergris.

---

Morgan Hunt was born and raised in Brigantine, an island off the coast of New Jersey. She is Coast Guard certified to sail small vessels, and spent four years in the Navy. An award-winning freelance writer, her poem "The Danger of Skipperlings" won Honorable Mention in the Oregon State Poetry Association contest in 2006. Her first three mystery novels were published by Alyson Books in 2007 and 2008, and her short story "The Angel's Share" will appear in the San Diego Noir anthology, to be published in 2011 by Akashic Books. She has long been fascinated by the inherent paradox of whale waste (ambergris) as perfume ingredient.

Louise Fishman

Louise Fishman, Sea (1995)

Brooke Bailey

The Divorce Bed

Faux wrought iron raises up four weathered arms
barred together by ivy spirals—a canopy
to cover me, having inherited my mother’s divorce bed
 
purchased as a throne, a shroud, a queen-sized place of leisure
where she could rest after expelling her fallen king
from the spent and ruined kingdom.  When I lay my head there
I absorb anxieties about my lovers from the mattress
where the hatchet she buried reaches up and wounds me,
a blade teasing my skin from just below the surface
 
enough to remind me that it’s there
like a ghost that barely swipes
your hair from behind, making you think that you’re crazy, that it
could be the wind, that you can’t be sure of anything.
 
In my reign, this is still a place no man
has been.  The pillows are scented with a soft
sandalwood, a waft of ylang-ylang, a woman’s scent
that’s not my scent.  I am wary of celebrating a new
love here, knowing this to be no wedding tent
 
but she advises me that regardless of where it happens
in our era, anywhere you choose to enter into monogamy
is dangerous at best.  Outside our door a chorus sings—
no virgins in white robes, but those that know of sacrifice,
those handmaidens who do not blush at the thought
of what will come when night falls and they’re told
that they can go.  Lips against the inside of knee and wrist,
white teeth biting down on broken skin, a hand directing a face
towards eager skin with the pulling of the hair.  Over time, the fights,
the distractions, bed death and resurrection, a Lazarus with falling breasts, an old
but faithful dog laboring to learn new tricks to bring her lover home.
 
What was the divorce bed has been consecrated again
but even as it creaks with the building of our passion
it still holds a soft chiding, a gentle threat
like those nursery rhymes about the plague the children sang
until those words they used and didn’t understand
exhausted them into their last rest.

---

Brooke Bailey holds a B.A. in English from Appalachian State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Sidereality, Defenestration, and twenty20 Journal. When she is not writing, she works as a corporate trainer in the insurance industry.

Jemma Watts

Jemma Watts, Fish 1 (2007)

Eleanor Lerman

For the Stay-At-Home Wife

While I am dressing, dream. While I collect my papers
and my courage, stay behind the bright tide of the dawn
and watch the stars wash up like shells upon the shore
Be safe. Be fearless in the silence. Protect the space
         where I should be

And then in green fields, golden fields ribboned with
flowers, go through the open gate. There will be no
wind; the warmth alone will heal you. Ribbons of
light, ribbons of clouds: all this is for you. Stay close
to home. Stay within the loving circle. Far away,
I will write your name between the sun and shadow
         on each page I sign

And when the twilight creeps into the house
with its sad eyes, turn on the lamp. Sit in the chair.
The key is in my pocket and I am coming home
with the news that everything you’ve lost
remembers you. In time, messages will turn up
in literature and science; in the way the moon
thinks of you when it lingers in the morning, wanting
to wait just one more hour before it is compelled
         to climb back into the dark

---

Carrara: The Sculptor Speaks

Even I am surprised by the way the story begins, with a white girl
born in Hong Kong. Blonde, French: how much more romantically
can the tale be told? She grows up rich, at the races, but cannot be
educated. Slumming in the gambling houses she marries twice:
everyone is in despair. So the banking cousins send her to Paris to
work in an uncle’s shop. Picture a cold spring. Picture rain on the stones
by the river, and me, the student with fifty francs, choosing between my
lust for art and chocolate. Which do you think I chose? Who do you think
was behind the counter? Remember, I will never be twenty-four again

Thus does fate exert its stranglehold. So now I see the hand of God
in everything: on windy days he rattles the teacups. On Sundays, he
lets loose the sparrows, like little kites of hope. And I am in the
basement, hammering Christ out of Carrara for him, Christ risen,
Christ robust and beautiful as an Italian afternoon. For her, winged
horses (though sculpted out of lesser stone): green-veined,
fire-eyed, they are avenging angels that no beast for wager can
outrun. And the banking cousins buy them all: yen, lira, HK dollars
pile up all around the world. But have I earned some measure of
mercy for her? Has this unexpected marriage bought me time?
Remember, if we were ever innocent, we will never be again

And I am in the basement, still studying my choices. With fifty francs
I walked into the chocolate shop, then took up my chisel, which still
still rings and rings against the stony milk that is His marble. And each
blow carries the riddle of my salvation: I found her, loved her. I was
faithful. Was there something more that you expected me to do?

---

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.

Irit Rabinowits

Irit Rabinowits, Untitled/1997

Jane Cassady

Love Poem with Traditional Anniversary Gifts

Shred the bills and soak the paper,
cotton together a place on the couch.

Never mind the leather hearts that voted against us,
I’m building you a house out of flowers and fruit.
(Stronger than wood, to postpone the burning.)

Festoon it with garlands of candy,
iron the perfect sheets.

I’m melting all of your heads-up pennies,
to make us copper cups.

I’ve had Saturday mornings bronzed for us,
buried the broken pottery.
(You can willow it out if you want.)

Never mind the aluminum music
of the Tuesday night recycle bin,
and maybe, darling, bad luck isn’t made of steel.

I’m embroidering silk pillows
with all your equations,
linen tablecloths of elements―
what falls through the lace, leave it.
Don't worry the edges.

Roll the ivory dice and smash the crystal.
Our china is patterned in contemporary verse
and TV plots.

What’s in your shoulder bag, flashing silver?

What do pearls do besides annoy oysters?

Do mistakes grow their own coral?

Do we have enough ruby in our blood?

Can we go to Cape May
and look at the ocean till it turns to sapphires?

Do you believe in gold?

When will you weedwack
the emerald backyard?

Will you plant me some facets, diamond?

---

Jane Cassady writes pop-culture horoscopes for the City Paper’s Arts and Culture Blog, Critical Mass. She is the Slam Mistress  of the Philadelphia Poetry Slam. Her poems have appeared in The November 3rd Club, The Comstock Review, Valley of the Contemporary Poets, and other journals. She's performed at such venues as LouderArts in New York City, Valley Contemporary Poets in Los Angeles, and The Encyclopedia Show in Chicago.

Lydia Daniller

Lydia Daniller, Lesbian Wedding

Caridad Moro

Contemplation of a Name
                          For Stacie

Stay,
          see
                    if I don’t taste of guayaba and mamey, sweet guarapo thick as my hips
                    swaying sweaty Celia Cruz rhythms in black-seamed stockings and Cuban
                    heels.

Stay,
           see
                    if I don’t bring Dutch parrot tulips, orange and red blazes for your table,
                    Belgian chocolat pyramid stacked on Virginia’s dishes for your buffet,
                    the essence of French lavender in a cobalt decanter for your vanity.

Stay,
           see
                    if I don’t pick three trifectas in a row, read stray pony hairs strewn like tea
                    leaves across the stable, kiss you at the window, winners.

Stay,
           see
                    if I don’t learn that song you love, pour it in your ear, my voice sediment
                    settling in your heart, silt that sifts through your veins with every beat.

Stay,
           see
                    if I don’t warrant the wait of avocados, figs, or kumquats, whatever your
                    fruit—even the pomegranate, so delicious you forgive its seeds.

---

Caridad Moro's poetry has appeared in numerous journals including The Crab Orchard Review, The Comstock Review, MiPoesias, The Seattle Review, CALYX, Spillway, The Pedestal, Slipstream, Fifth Wednesday Journal and others. She is the recipient of a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry, and her work has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart. Her chapbook Visionware is available from Finishing Line Press.

Rolande

Rolande, Le Souper Galant II (1979)

Sarah Sarai

Longing for a Blue Sky

I am goal-oriented like an orgasm,
exhausted already by details of your ego.
My details are colored "hesitation" and "confidence?"
though age, she educates.

My mood is London longing for a blue sky.
I take the Hudson River as my lover
the Southwest as my comforter
Mount Shasta as my tomb.
Who wouldn't want to spend millennia
in a fine female breast?

In my pain—everything I need to be pleased.
I am pleased already, could you shut up!
See me, in a woman's burial mound?
About your ego:
It destroys nothing, not even itself.

---

Sarah Sarai has poems forthcoming in Gargoyle and Boston Review. Her collection, The Future Is Happy, was published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2009. She also writes fiction, with stories in ragazine.cc, Tampa Review, Storyglossia, South Dakota Review and others.

Emily Roysdon

Emily Roysdon, The Piers Untitled (#2), 2010

Shirley Pulido

Silver and Gold

THAT RUINOUS ROCK and Reason’s wreck,
    The Moon, my one-time master!
His sigh, my sigh—his phase, my clock;
Ah, how I loved that ruinous rock!
    I ran—and he ran faster ...
              __________

I’m old and can afford the Sun
    Now, sixty some years after:
When Moon spilled silver on my head
And dumped me from his rocky bed ...
    Sun climbed in, —all laughter!

---

Shirley Pulido is a professional portrait painter, and Fulbright scholar. Her work can be seen at the Vose Gallery in Boston. She is a latecomer to poetry and mad about the sonnet. Her poems have only begun their career with an appearance in two anthologies just this year: Filled with Breath: 30 Sonnets By 30 Poets, and The 2010 Poet's Guide to New Hampshire: More Places, More Poets. Another poem is forthcoming in Light Quarterly.

Daisy Eneix

Daisy Eneix, Moon Toss (2008)

Cally Conan-Davies

I Need Men

Cold men who frame themselves in cold windows,
seeing reservoirs as sheets of lead,
who beat their hearts with black winds and bare trees
then bury them in books, or bury them
beneath their feet; who run from love and moan
it flees from me, and settle back in bed
just the same, comforted, grim as stone.
These men, who hide behind the furniture
when a real wind blows in, I need these men

like a horse-kick to the head. They have the gall
to laugh at girls like me who laugh and sing
sweet love-heart things—but now I’ve learned to say:
Move from the window, mate, and cop it sweet,
or freeze your arse off romanticizing sleet.

---

Cally Conan-Davies is an itinerant writer, driving and biking and sailing and kayaking her way around Australia. Sometimes, she picks up a poem. Some of these have appeared in Able Muse Review, The Flea, and may be read in The Able Muse Anthology.

Imogene Cunningham

Imogene Cunningham, The Dream (1910)

Sappho - Brian Carr

Love and the Trick-Stitching Child

Everlasting Love rich in heaven’s chair,
trick-stitching child: don’t beat my heart
down with too much worry. Maiden,
I pray...
Come to my pied-à-terre if ever so many times over
I cried out for you so far away. You heard.
You believed. You left that golden palace.
You came
chauffeured. Sparrows! Beautiful swift sparrows
flapped you down to me on quick-trembling
wings over black earth. Straight through,
no wandering,
they were here in a flash. You! Like a sacrament
you smiled. Your face ageless, you asked
why again I suffered
why again I called
what my crazy heart really wants this time.
“Who again convince? What quick friendship
do you want? Who hurts you
this time?
Does she run? Then she’ll chase.
Didn’t like the gifts? Then she’ll give them.
She does not love? Soon.
No choice for her.”
Get here now! I’m strangling in worries!
Cut them. My heart wants so much!
Make it happen! This time,
fight on my side.


Translated by Brian Carr
Read by Cally Conan-Davies

---

Brian Carr first published this translation of Sappho at Agenda in the UK.

Leslie Satterfield

Leslie Satterfield, I thought she was mine (2), 2008