91. RENT-A-DILDO.COM

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62. SEX

From the Archives

(March 2005) Woody Allen said “I don’t know what the question is, but sex is definitely the answer.”

My cheating pal is cheating again and I feel dirty knowing about it. And I wish I didn't have to watch her repeat this all-too-familiar pattern.

She craves intimacy and asks woman after woman out seeking connection, then runs as hard as she can when she finds it. The more attracted she is to the woman, the harder she runs (or she has another affair despite being in love with this woman, effectively destroying their intimacy and thwarting their potential, which somehow makes her feel safe and in control).

She's in a long-term relationship now that is safe, but it has never provided the intimacy that she desires. Or, as another pal said, her partner is safe, and my pal knows taht her partner will never introduce any monsters into the equation.

My friend has always been terrified of internal exploration and seems incapable of acknowledging her fears or what's going on inside that makes her unable to endure intimacy and, ultimately, leaves her miserable. Like me, she has a strong need to be perceived as competent, in control, and capable of keeping a firm handle on things—only she doesn't have the creative outlets that I have that (sometimes) balance that control and she runs away from self-awareness the first time it brings up anything scary (whereas I seek it out, for the most part).

She's been having an affair with a woman who has really helped her get beyond some of her walls and they say they’re in love with each other, but my friend has now run away three times when this woman has left everything behind in order to be with her.

I hate to see a relationship end, but I hate even more to watch her screw up because she's so afraid to let down her guard and risk getting hurt.

I think a place where my friend can expose herself and feel unconditional safety—in a relationship or, if she would tell the truth to her shrink, with her shrink—might allow her to figure out what makes her this afraid of intimacy, of digging deep, but she can't let her guard down enough to trust or accept intimacy when it is offered to her. And now she's messing up her affair, which actually seems good, by continuing to see a third woman (who will express intimacy and then my friend will find another woman and . . .).

I've thought for some time that sex is the key to getting past my friend's walls, is the thing that might give her access to those scary places in a way that doesn't cause her to run away because she's exposed and naked and might get hurt. She lets her guard down sexually (eventually) and is sexually curious, so B&D just might be the thing that will allow her to trust a woman.

I keep hoping she'll find some determined femme who's so alluring that she'll go to new sexual places with her despite her fears, someone who will dominate my friend in a safe manner so that she can finally lose control and see that she survived it.

Guess we’ll see.

48. FINE UPSTANDING WOMEN

From the Archives

(March 2005) Happy birthday GLORIA STEINEM and FLANNERY O’CONNOR, two fine women I admire.

I also admire The Hell-Bound Femme who posted this reply to the WseekingW section of craigslist:

Reply to: anon-65355929@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-03-24, 7:45PM PST

To: the author of the post entitled "So what is fucking?"

Dear Friend,
First of all, I would like to thank you for coming into the W4W section of Craigslist and informing all of us of how wrong we are in life. Without people like you telling people like me that homosexuality is "dirty," I might never know the error of my ways. I blame my faults on the packaged meat and the Indigo Girls. The estrogen in the meat turned me gay, and the Indigo Girls made me think it was OK; they tood advantage of my lack of free will and sheep-like tendencies. Thank you so much for saving me from the sin of a womans kiss. Congratulations! Your mission is accomplished. Thanks to you, I now have a healthy and holy craving for a good, God abiding cock. In fact, if you are single, I would love to date you... but before I give you my phone number, I just have one question:

Who the fuck do you think you are?

Was that lovely little rant at the end of your post a fucking joke?

I pray that it was, and so should you, because the qualifications for being "dirty" aren't limited to homosexuality. In fact, if God really is as judgmental as you portray him to be, than you - being the hateful little troll that you are - will wind up in Hell too. Except, for you, it will be even worse, since you will be surrounded by all of us "dirty" queers.

Can women fuck other women? Is that what you want to know? The answer is yes. We can, and we do. We fuck. We make love. We kiss. We caress. In fact, minus the external genitalia that retracts when it's cold (you'll note that I am not feeling "left out" about that), we can do anything you can do. For the record, we also eat, drink, work, drive cars, wear shoes, sweat when it's hot, sleep when we're tired, and get pissed when we deal with stupid people. Is there anything else that you would like to question about our actions or abilities, or does that about cover it?

Oh, that's right, you also wanted to know HOW we fuck. Why don't you tell me? After all, you already seem to know so much about us (i.e. how we are dirty, a disgrace, etc...) Since you already have all the answers, I can probably just stop here.

Though, I should point out that there is something that we do differently than you - we use spell check. Disease is spelled with an "i," dip-shit.

People like you disgust me. Truthfully, I would rather be in Hell with all of the other dykes and fags than up in Heaven with people like you.


XOXO
- The Hell-bound Femme

P.s. Here is a little lesson in grammar:

"I THINK ELLEN AND ALL OF YOU
FUKING WHORES...........ARE GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" - The "........" isn't necessary, and you are missing a "c" in the word "fucking."

"GOD HE WILL IGNORE YOU TO ALL OF YOU" - This is not a sentence.

"YOU WILL SUFFER THE CONCECUENCES OF YOU DESEASE" - This is not a sentence, either, and the word "consequences" is spelled with a "Q."

"GOD NEVER CREATE CRAZY HOMOSEXUALS" - If I ever have children, remind me not to send them to the same kindergarten you went to.

Don't worry, grammar and sentence structure are very difficult to learn, and I know that all this criticism must be getting to you. If it's any consolation, I thought that your choice of ending your closing sentence with the word "retard" was truly brilliant. Truly. Way to drive it all home, sport!

This reply is pretty fucking amusing, too:

Reply to: anon-65343526@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-03-24, 5:47PM PST

Yes. I am a hater. But I'm interested in being saved. Why don't ya on come over and speak to me about redemption while I pound ya with my strap-on...

14. BITTERNESS

From the Archives (March 2005)

BITTERNESS
by Olga Broumas

She who loves roses must be patient
and not cry out when she is pierced by thorns.
—Sappho

In parody
of a grade-B film, our private
self-conscious soapie, as we fall
into the common, suspended
disbelief of love, you ask
will I still be
here tomorrow, next week, tonight
you ask me am I really
here. My passion delights

and surprises you, comfortable
as you’ve been without it. Lulled,
comfortable as a float myself in your real
and rounded arms, I can only smile
back, indulgently
at such questions. In the second reel—

a season of weeks, two
flights across the glamorous Atlantic, one
orgy and the predictable divorce
scenes later—I’m fading out
in the final close-up
alone. As one

heroine in this
two-bit production to the other, how long
did you, did we both know
the script
meant you to wake up doubting
in those first nights, not me, my daytime
serial solvency, but yours.

13. WHAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET

From the Archives (March 2005)

SONG FOR SANNA
by Olga Broumas

...in this way the future enters
into us, in order to transform itself
in us before it happens.
—Rilke

What hasn’t happened
intrudes, so much
hasn’t yet happened. In the steamy
kitchens we meet in, kettles
are always boiling, water for tea, the steep
infusions we occupy
hands and mouth with, steam
filming our breath, a convenient

subterfuge, a disguise
for the now
sharp intake, the measured
outlet of air, the sigh, the gutting
loneliness

of the present where
what hasn’t happened will
not be ignored, intrudes, separates
from the conversation like milk
from cream, desire

rising between the cups, brimming
over our saucers, clouding the minty
air, its own
aroma a pungent
stress, once again, you will get
up, put on your coat, go

home to the safer passions, moisture
clinging still to your spoon, as the afternoon
wears on, and I miss, I
miss you.

12. BEGIN BY THE TOUCH

From the Archives (March 2005)

IO
by Olga Broumas

One would know nothing.
One would begin by the touch
return to her body,
One would forget
even the three
soft cages
where summer lasts.
One would regret nothing.
One would first touch the mouth
then the warm
pulsing places that wait
that wait
and the last song around them
a shed of light.
A crumpled apron, a headcloth, a veil.
One would keep nothing.
By the still mouths of fear
one would listen. Desire
would spill past each lip
and caution. That which is light
would remain.
That which is
still would grow fertile.

11. BEGINNING WITH O

From the Archives

(March 2005) Listening to Marilyn Hacker, a dyke master of formal verse and sonnet sequences, describe her writing process made me hyperaware of meter (even though I only occasionally write formalist poetry).

So here’s a brief poetry lesson to introduce a couple of excellent dactyls by Olga Broumas:

To write metrically is to measure and you can measure 4 different kinds of meter: accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and quantitative.

Dactyls fall into the accentual-syllabic category, the most common type of meter in English.

Poets measure the number of accents and the number of syllables using the basic unit of a foot, or, a rhythmical pattern that generally contains one accented syllable and one or more unaccented syllables.

A dactyl is one of 4 feet mostly widely used in accentual-syllabic meter—iamb, trochee, anapest, and dactyl.

Poets also use substitute feet—spondee or pyrrhic—to vary rhythm.

Note the following diacritical marks: ‘ , or the acute accent, represents an accented syllable, and X represents an unaccented syllable.

A dactyl is ‘XX, as in “faithfully.”

That’s all very technical and distancing, but let’s go for the stomach now and read two of Olga Broumas from Beginning with O.

LINE OF THE HEART

Up the long hill, the earth rut steamed in the strange sun.
We, walking between its labia, loverlike, palm to palm.

•

LINE OF THE MIND

The branch splits in two: I will eat both the male
and the female fruit. Gnaw back the fork to its simple crotch.

10. CRAWLING WITH POETRY

From the Archives

(March 2005) I found a Baby’s First Memories book that my mother kept about me. It’s strange and more than a little sad to think about her scribbling this stuff down way back when.

She married my father when he was 26 and she was only 18 and they started having babies right away.

They had my sister just 10 months after their wedding and had me just 15 months after that.

I’m never sure exactly when adult-onset paranoid schizophrenia took over my mother’s (and our) world, but most of my memories of her are colored by this illness.

This book makes me think about her as a nineteen-year-old mother, jotting down notes about her new babies while she and my father build the house that I would grow up in.

Basic stats > born @ 9:30 PM weighing 6 pounds 8.5 oz. • 19.25 inches height • round head • allergic to evaporated milk

Milestones > coos @ 1.5 months • reacts to emotions (fright/anger) @ 1.5 months • reacts to music @ 1.5 months • laughs out loud @ 3.5 months • crawls @ 6.5 months • understands no @ 7 months • 1st step @ 13 months

And here’s an entry I couldn’t resist:

Baby enjoys singing and is seldom quiet. Her attention is rarely held by toys but occasionally she gets very busy, usually with boy’s toys. She enjoys climbing trees and rides her tricycle very daringly. She is seldom cooperative at play and usually just wants her own way. And what a temper! She really lets us know when she’s not satisfied.

I spent the day at the LGBTQ leadership summit and met some particularly interesting folks from the LGBT lawyers association and from P-FLAG. Was especially impressed by all the work being done in rural communities, and I’m glad we’re building these coalitions.

Now I’m sipping a cup of hot tea and reading a collection of Olga Broumas’s poems.

Here are a few sections from another sexy Broumas poem:

CARITAS

I.
Erik Satie, accused
once of formlessness, composed
a sonata titled: Composition in the Form
of a Pear. When I tell you
that it would take
more brilliance than Mozart
more melancholy precision than Brahms
to compose a sonata in the form of
your breasts, you
don’t believe me. I lie
next to your infidel sleep, all night
in pain
and lonely with my silenced
pleasure. Your breasts
in their moonlit pallor
invade me, lightly, like minor
fugues. I lie
between your sapling thighs, tongue
flat on your double lips, giving
voice, giving
voice. Opulent
as a continent in the rising light, you sleep
on, indifferent
to my gushing praises. It is
as it should be, Atlantis,
Cyprus, Crete, the encircled
civilizations, serene
in their tidal basins, dolphin-
loved, didn’t heed to the faint, the
riotous
praise
of the lapping sea.

2.
Your knees, those pinnacles
competing with the finest
dimpled, five-
year-old chins, are
dancing. Ecstatic as nuns
in their delirious habit, like
runaway needles on a multiple graph,
the first organic model of
seismographs, charting
the crest I keep you on
and on till all
the sensitive numbers on the
Richter scale ring out at
once, but
silently: a choir
of sundial alarums. You reach that place,
levitated by pleasure, the first
glimpse the melting
glacier must
have had, rounding the precipice,
of what came to be known as
Niagara Falls. After all this time,
every time,
like a finger inside
the tight-gummed,
spittle-bright, atavistic
suckle of
a newborn’s fragile-lipped
mouth, I
embrace you, my heart
a four-celled embryo, swimming
a pulse, a bloodstream that becomes, month
to month, less
of a stranger’s, more
intimate, her
own.

3.
There are people who do not explore the in-
sides of flowers—Sandra Hochman

With the clear
plastic speculum, transparent
and, when inserted, pink like the convex
carapace of a prawn, flashlight in hand, I
guide you
inside the small
cathedral of my cun+. The unexpected
light dazzles you. This flesh, my darling, always
invisible like the wet
sides of stones, the hidden
hemisphere of the moon, startles you
with its brilliance, the little
dome a spitting
miniature of the Haghia Sophia
with its circlet of openings
to the Mediterranean sun.
A woman-made language would
have as many synonyms for pink/light-filled/holy as
the Eskimo does
for snow: Speechless, you
shift the flashlight from
hand to hand, flickering. An orgy
of candles. Lourdes in mid-August. A flurry of
audible breaths, a seething
of holiness, and
behold
a tear
forms in the single eye, carmine
and catholic. You too, my darling, are
folded, clean
round, a light-filled temple, complete
with miraculous icon, shedding
her perfect tears, in touch
with the hidden hemispheres,
the dome
of our cyclops moon.

LISTENING TO: Lazy Afternoon, performed by Patti Austin

READING: Olga Broumas’s Rave: Poems 1975–1999