He lazed alone inside the cubicle,
as if snoozing on an altar in a chapel,
until I hesitated, made my choice.
I stepped inside and he, by allowing me
to loosen his towel, strum the hairs on his thigh,
proved consent by the subtlest degree.
I’ll do whatever Patrick tells me, try
a little less tongue tonight, softly
skim your lips with kisses where we lie.
EMMA REAY
Have you imagined having sex with me?
Have you imagined having sex with me?
Planned exactly how it would be?
Have you pictured all the faces?
The sighs, the eyes, the grimaces?
Have you schemed how we’d get started?
Am I flash-naked, legs parted?
Or maybe there’s some back-story,
Of brave knights and morning glory?
Or a plumber, a pizza boy.
And what am I – coquette or coy?
Am I Russian? Or am I Thai?
With skin on thin or fat on thigh?
Am I a pliable, edible fool?
Or cougar-clawed, matured and cruel?
Do I like you? Do you hope I do?
Do you wish I were more open with you?
I might be Flora, or Fauna, or Eve, or Dawn,
Alder Trees, Laurel Leaves, Spider, Swan;
I am 5 ft. 7, fair, Caucasian;
Territory vulnerable to invasion;
I am all states; I am armies campaigning;
I am trying and taxing and waxing and waning;
I’m in orbit; I’m a film on repeat;
I’m Victory, I’m cold, I’m young, I’m defeat.
I stretch for miles, and if you tried
To run, like a stream down a mountain’s side,
More faithful than you meant to be,
You could run for hours and never leave me.
ISOBEL DIXON
Stars, Flowers, Grass and Us
After our walk in the park at dusk
I run myself a bath, hold high
the little vial: three drops of lavender.
I swirl the oil into a swift ellipse, sweet,
steaming hot, and think of how the Milky Way
is swept. What hand stirred that?
I peel my dress up from my body’s stem,
a time-lapse blossoming above my head,
arms raised a moment – praise in church –
then let the flare of fabric drop, unclip
my bra, shrug all my trappings off, step in.
As the water settles to my collarbones,
small shreds of grass release, float up:
green secret constellation drifting here
above my belly, ribs, small watery shadows
cast upon my skin. Now there’s no doubt
whose hands it is I’m thinking of.
HELEN CLARE
A well-tempered keyboard
Now that I am finally getting laid again
my piano playing is improving. What else
would I do in those moments of waiting
bathed, perfumed, satinned, variously
analgised and anaesthetised?
It seems impossible to me now, that
anyone could play Bach without thinking
of sex. More than the insistence of that
pulsing left hand chord, it’s the way we move
from key to key as if harmony were a body.
My fingers are getting nimbler; I can dream
of grace in those quick passages, almost
believe that nerves could heal. I’ve noticed too
that these days sex ends like a chorale, a single
note slipping into the home chord: a-a-men.
VICTORIA GATEHOUSE
Phosphorescence
Record this you say and I’m left
in the shallows, holding your phone.
And I capture it all – the moon
low and lush as a forbidden fruit,
you, striking light after light
as you cross the bay, the way
your face, as you turn to wave,
is star-varnished like that of a god.
Before you upload, before the flurry
of likes for this phenomenon,
there’s a moment when your world
is gleaming in my hands. Tonight
I would gulp down this blooming ocean
for a taste of your skin.
ALAN BUCKLEY
The Gift
I knew then, if I hadn’t known before –
seeing you at that hippie bash in pink,
drawn to the rolling strut and thrust of your
tight hipsters, glancing at the strip of skin
under the shrunk-down tee – how anyone
might have that shock, as feelings pressure up
from some persistent spring, thought to be long
dried out. I squeezed my arms into the hug
and sensed your breath, its feather on my neck.
There was no shame. We both knew some things live
quite happily in shadow, and unsaid,
their insubstantiality their gift.
We eyed the women, did the weigh-up talk;
the way men do, like sparring Bantam cocks.
IKHDA AYUNING MAHARSI
Pinkie Minimus
I asked you to keep the promise
using your, my Pinkie Minimus,
like when we were children.
I hoped that you would keep your promise
that we made by Pinkie Minimus
like when we were moppets.
But what did you do
but suck my Pinkie Minimus,
wrestled with worms and germs.
Yes o yes o
my Pinkie Minimus
has been sucked,
licked by your blunt tongue.
O no o no no
what I asked was the promise
of lost childhood,
two Pinkie Minimus
linked to each other.
Yes o yes o
we should have put our wedding rings
on the tiny
platoon
Pinkie Minimus.
RAMONA HERDMAN
Shave
The backs of men’s necks
queue on the Tube.
Hot breath and the mustn’t
of reaching to touch. Such
a little inch of shared air
to transgress. Sticky dress
and long haul home to owned skin.
When I was eighteen,
my lover asked me to stand over him
with little buzzing clippers, to stroke
the hair off with their insect mouth.
I kissed all up that new tickle
of conquered skull, triumphant.
He walked beside me shorn, marked mine.
My thumb the first to smooth across, enjoy
the bite of new-cut hair.
Another summer, older,
and it’s my father asking.
Widower, too ill to go out.
Such uncomfortable trespass,
shudder and prickle,
to walk the clippers the way his second wife did,
cut paths over his small grey head.
I swept up after. I holstered the clippers
in the leatherette case and put them away
in the too-tidy bathroom of his last house.
There will always be another summer.
This one, both of us in this dappled, dazzling bath,
I rest one heel
then the other
on your shoulder, lean back
and trust your razor
down my leg, nuzzling
the unseen back of my knee.
SOPHIA BLACKWELL
The Globemakers
We’ve been in bed all day. The winter sun
has nudged
its pale head at our bedroom window
but, with no audience, has quickly gone.
I’m moulding the warm spheres of you, my hands
softly holding your skull’s stubborn curve,
ticking with life, all your well-loved lands
elaborately renamed. Knees, elbows, hips
become meridian, terrain, equator,
the plains between them measured by my lips.
We know the world, its inkblots and crevasses,
its latitudes. The stars are where we left them.
We know the streets, their gutters, their sadness,
but these four hands are artful instruments
that can remake a world, and these warm sheets
are full of fallen rivers and lost crescents
of moon and paper. So we pinch them tight
between our fingers, paste them into place.
Something stirs, an extra inch of light
shimmering closer, ice becoming water,
something beyond the sea-wall of the night
that’s vigorous, and sweet, and isn’t winter.
STEPHANIE GREEN
My Love, the Shetland Trowie
After Rabelais
His eyes are like extinguished lighthouses
His eyebrows are a gadderie of fiddlers
His nose a broken sea-arch
His jaw is like the blue ramp of the ferry lowering
then clanking shut
His mouth a hollow gloup
His teeth smashed Blue Vodka bottles
His saliva is like the seven tides of Shetland
His chest hair a scratchy kishie
His arms whirling wind turbines
His elbows are like crane-winches
His legs are posts bristling with barnacles
His buttocks are half-submerged skerries
His member is like the seal’s head bobbing up
and down in the harbour
His bollocks are ponies’ nose-bags
His pubic hair is the hay-nets flung
over plastic rubbish bags
His arsehole is like the slippery steps down
to the lower deck
His piss is the swell in a Force 10 gale
His sweat is salty houb water
His oxters are like skories’ nests
His nipples are the rings of salmon-traps
His navel is a fire-bucket peppered
with fag butts
His skin is like stiff, sea-drenched gaiters
His breath’s a blow-hole
His sigh the haar
His fart is like the flare at Sullom Voe
Glossary: gadderie – gathering; gloup – collapsed cave;
haar – sea-mist; houb – salty loch; kishie – woven straw pannier;
oxter – arm-pit; skorie – adolescent herring gull;
trow or trowie – Shetland troll.
HUGH DUNKERLEY
Hare
for Bethan
*
Snakes that cast your coats for new,
Chameleons that alter hue,
Hares that yearly sexes change.
Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess
I
You were surprised by its huge ears
alert and stiff in the long grass
its masculine nose
the lithe terrier-like body.
We were almost on it
when the hare erupted into flight
something more like a deer
than a rabbit in the way it ran
bounding in fast surefooted leaps
across the astonished field
until it veered suddenly, rose into the air
and was gone in the dusk of the wood
leaving only this impression
warm in the still unravelling grass.
II
Warm in the still unravelling sheets
I run my fingers down your spine
trace the soft vestigial hair of an animal
that only minutes ago I held
bucking in my arms, a fierceness
I’d never imagined, straining for release
a changeling that slipped between my fingers
and was gone with a cry
now resolving itself back into you.
VASILIKI ALBEDO BENNU
Office hour
in his dim, cluttered room
and he’s going over the derivation
of Spearman’s correlation coefficient but I
am correlating to the coefficient of his ring finger,
taken by the girth of the wrist flexor packing
his unbuttoned cuff. I am close
enough to see the warp
of his poplin shirt, breathe in the woody
base note of his aftershave. And now
a message pops up on his screen, something
about the tightness of duct tape on
lips and a whip, and all I can do
is pretend I didn’t see,
but I did. But I did.
NATALIE SHAW
He liked her to talk about other women’s breasts
Bridget’s nipples are small and pink,
tiny strawberries she offers to her baby.
Eva’s breasts: round like puddings
whipped and creamy, pale, freckled –
then Sam, always on display,
flat as Marie-Antoinette’s
champagne cups – pop! And then the fizz
(her head – her head quite gone by then)
VICTORIA KENNEFICK
Contagion
In the lecture theatre, I sit in the dark
(there will be slides about Visigoths).
You stroll in: odour of unwashed socks and Lynx
invades, sticks
to this plaid shirt which I wear
in an ironic way, breasts
push against the check,
strain blue-flecked buttons.
You wear a sweater
big and woolly, with sleeves that go way past your hands –
if I ever see your hands,
if I catch one glimpse I will lick them, palm to thumb,
suck
each
finger.
You sit in front of me, my pupils expand,
you have a cold, one that needs a tissue –
a couple of tissues, a full, glorious box, but you don’t have any,
you messy thing.
You use your sleeves, you use your
sleeves, you sneeze and I wish I knew your name.
I mumble ‘Goth Bless you’, hope you’ll hear,
you run your sweet nose over a loose cuff.
I wear this plaid shirt
I want to rip to pieces, let puny buttons fall in surrender,
as spoils of Visigoth pillage project on the white screen
in Boole Basement Lecture Theatre One, I want to
blow
your
nose.
LAURA McKEE
how we taste
we once had a map
and thought we knew
where to unbury the salty
and the sweet
then we discovered
these buds spread wider
saliva wets the folds of things
and pours
into the whole of our mouths
and down our throats
touches nerves in our heads
teaches our tongues to crave
JERROLD YAM
Prize
Like a swig of medicine, the undressing is easy;
I watch the sun rehearse over the arena,
its lonely eye laying mahogany sheets
on a row of strangers. Then, when it rages
enough for a change, I slip
soundlessly in the pool, legs
pivoting for the kick-off, as if recalling the force with
which a man enters my quiet chamber. And the sun
agrees, setting
live wires over a turquoise floor;
I am drawn to its audacity, its electrical charm
tamed by water. Later in the changing
room we would smile, just short of crime, desperation
stiffening like a drug as we become
conjoined, at the pelvis, every breath
also traced with time’s impatient handwriting.
It ends as it may only end, wrenched
free to false safety, as if afraid
of intimacy. I press a finger
to the slag, to my lips,
its awkward musk
stinging like genius. By then
you would have gone, so sure of
diving into another life.
DI SLANEY
Their letters
1st May 1610
Her letter
is pressed from flour-damp breast to Judas-hand Joanna, hides in spinster folds to pass the Hall, makes its way first to lips then nose, Peter eager for the hard-worked scent of her, his Rose with lush, wide petals and soft sticky buds, last pinched and tipped on Hollyn Hill St George’s Day past, under the crab apple and in sudden view of big John Beale, his face a ruddy fluster, his mouth a sour benediction recocked to testimony after. Her letter brings an intake of delight, a crotch twitch of sweet slickness full remembered, invites him to visit her indoors, her husband Nicholas off to Lincoln at short call, her window open 10 o’clock this night, and she will take him in.
6th May 1610
His letter
travels safe to Bilsthorpe with trusted Thomas, firm downward strokes on stiff white parchment vowing more than she could dream, trapped in this loveless for six cold years, her husband good for canny trade everywhere except in bed, a man of stolid hopes and shuttered heart. His letter teases with dotted i’s and double crossed t’s, flushes hot tongue thoughts of curls and thighs until her forehead pounds, leant hard against the larder door. His letter pleads she risk again, to meet him outside her house tonight when the moon turns away so not to be complicit in their sin. His letter in its supple roll enfolds their last two near escapes and tightens them to nothing, her sweaty fingers toying with the ribbon, willing to believe.
Mildly Erotic Verse Page 2