The Poetry of Sex

by Hannah, Sophie

  And his fingers didn’t smell of smoke, he didn’t

  nudge me onto my back, like you did, grunting

  as he unzipped my jeans, complaining

  you’re so bony, and demanding, Now you do something –

  hold it like this. David took my virginity

  in a room scented with white roses, having smoothed

  the sheets himself, slotted ‘How Can I be Sure?’

  into the tape machine. And when we were done

  he didn’t roll off, zip up and slouch downstairs

  to watch the end of Match of the Day with my brother,

  oh no, not David. He washed me, patted me dry

  with fat blue towels, his eyes brim-full of tears.

  A Man Greets His Wife from Her Short Break Away

  Rebecca Goss

  The first thing they do is embrace.

  Fat smiles stay on their faces

  all the way to the restaurant.

  He eats ribs with sticky, podgy fingers.

  She bites chicken wings with shiny lips.

  They have a pudding each and share another.

  In the car, she tells him about a girl she saw,

  with a short, spotted skirt that flapped

  around one long limb.

  ‘There wasn’t even a stump to satisfy me,

  just a space where the leg should’ve been.’

  ‘Was she very pretty?’

  ‘Yes she was.’

  They stop talking and at traffic lights

  he strokes her thigh, instead of saying

  how sad her story sounds. Quietly, he resents the one-legged girl

  for changing the mood between them, resents his wife

  for telling him the tale at all.

  Making love to her later, it’s a pretty teenager

  sitting astride his wide belly. One leg tucked behind,

  leaving the torso, smooth and deformed, moving over him.

  Wanting to Think

  Michael Schmidt

  Why, when I want to think of you, do I think of him?

  He may be dead, and yet he still lies with you

  Warming his calloused hands between your thighs.

  He may still be alive, and his lips for ever

  Puckered on your nipple, above your heart.

  I want to think about you in my arms, the way we were

  For a while. Then he came out of nowhere to stay.

  He was tall, and golden, stripped to the waist, when we sawed

  And chopped all autumn the firewood, heaped it

  Outside your kitchen door. You were always watching;

  You patted him on the back and sniffed the air

  Pungent with our sweat, you caught his smell.

  That autumn, when I lay with you, you started pretending

  These hands of mine were his hands in the dark, these lips

  His and the tufts in my armpits his and you inhaled

  Hungry, pressed against me, pressed against

  A man you were imagining in my place:

  Shaping, stretching me to fit your bed; no wonder

  When I think of you, as I do, each day and night, I think

  Of what you were thinking of, how you watched as I watched you,

  How as autumn ended, just before you left

  That night, noiseless, away with him for good,

  I came upon him at twilight in a clearing.

  After the weeks we’d mutely worked together,

  Till dark we rested in the deep cool grass without a word.

  While all the time I loved you, as I love you,

  He lay with me and he was satisfied,

  I lay with him and not for a minute thought

  Of how you watched through the screen door, but only

  How musky, how good he smelled, and his hand on my chest.

  3

  ‘A NIGHT PICKED FROM A HUNDRED AND ONE’

  Imperial

  Don Paterson

  Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I’m frightened –

  I covered her mouth with my own;

  she lay in my arms till the storm-window brightened

  and stood at our heads like a stone

  After months of jaw-jaw, determined that neither

  win ground, or be handed the edge,

  we gave ourselves up, one to the other

  like prisoners over a bridge

  and no trade was ever so fair or so tender;

  so where was the flaw in the plan,

  the night we lay down on the flag of surrender

  and woke on the flag of Japan

  Viginty Alley

  Tim Liardet

  I was thrown, you might say, on the mercy

  Of her knowledge. Were there less, there’d be plenty:

  Undo this, she softly cajoled, no, this.

  Miles away, her slant green eyes slid up

  To the contingencies of cloud ebbing over the sidings.

  When she wrote it there on the subway wall

  In an unbookish hand as deep red as Chianti

  She dropped, like she dropped her gaze, the r and i –

  X marks the spot. Here’s where the mammer’s boy

  Lost his viginty.

  It, whatever it was, indeed was lost

  Along with the gormless and the donkey-voiced,

  Along with all sense of ingenuous folly

  Once the chemicals started to boil in the pit.

  It was lost there, or left, or merely discarded

  Like creaky, unbroken shoes, like out-of-season holly.

  It was lost, or merely dumped

  Along with everything else no longer of use

  Down at the deep end of Viginty Alley.

  Outside

  Robert Frant

  I thought you’d stop my searching touch

  Although you wanted just as much

  To have me on this crowded route;

  Your denim skirt, my soft dark suit,

  But even though we could be seen

  I ached to feel myself between

  Your legs, to sense the moistness there

  For me if I would only dare.

  I slid your skirt above your hips,

  Your naked neck against my lips

  Then eased my hardness into you.

  A gasp, a moan, my hardness grew.

  The people never dropped their pace

  Not knowing that our close embrace

  Was hiding something known to just

  We two: our deep, impatient lust.

  Amores 1.5

  Ovid

  A hot afternoon: siesta-time. Exhausted,

  I lay sprawled across my bed.

  One window-shutter was closed, the other stood half-open,

  And the light came sifting through

  As it does in a wood. It recalled that crepuscular glow at sunset

  Or the trembling moment between darkness and dawn,

  Just right for a modest girl whose delicate bashfulness

  Needs some camouflage. And then –

  In stole Corinna, long hair tumbled about her

  Soft white throat, a rustle of summer skirts,

  Like some fabulous Eastern queen en route to her bridal-chamber –

  Or a top-line city call-girl, out on the job.

  I tore the dress off her – not that it really hid much,

  But all the same she struggled to keep it on:

  Yet her efforts were unconvincing, she seemed half-hearted –

  Inner self-betrayal made her give up.

  When at last she stood naked before me, not a stitch of clothing,

  I couldn’t fault her body at any point.

  Smooth shoulders, delectable arms (I saw, I touched them),

  Nipples inviting caresses, the flat

  Belly outlined beneath that flawless bosom,

  Exquisite curve of a hip, firm youthful thighs.

  But why catalogue details? Nothing came short of perfection,

&
nbsp; And I clasped her naked body close to mine.

  Fill in the rest for yourselves! Tired at last, we lay sleeping.

  May my siestas often turn out that way!

  Trans. Peter Green

  The Wasp Station

  Paul Johnston

  He was sixteen, she in her forties – the classic older woman

  scenario, though her hair was shorter than Anne Bancroft’s

  and he wasn’t such a dork as Dustin Hoffman.

  They didn’t do it in a hotel but in a garden shed, rusty

  sickles, shovels and old model railway bits all around.

  A wasp was hitting the buffers on the web-wrought window.

  His lack of experience hung off him like a fireman’s uniform

  as he stammered, bruised lips when he kissed her and grabbed

  for her breasts when she ground their groins together.

  She opened her blouse and let him lap the c-cup cornucopia,

  her nipples rigid as funnels. It was obvious that squeezing his rod

  would bring him juddering to the terminus faster than the Flying Scot.

  ‘Now we take our time,’ she said, reginal. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ his look

  bolder despite the stickiness in his boxers. He stripped them off

  and wiped himself, then tapped his rapidly rising tool

  against her whiter-than-the-driven-steam knickers.

  She pulled aside the gusset and let him in. All aboard!

  They rode the Orient Express to Paris, Venice, Istanbul,

  cities on fire with carnal pleasure. She shrieked as they entered

  the tunnel, pistons thundering and steam cocks fully open.

  She arrived first, bucking, nails digging into his coal tender.

  He squealed and spurted, head back like a plume of wind-whipped smoke,

  then panted in her ear, ‘I love you, Aunt Alice.’ She looked away;

  the wasp was tangled in the silken threads, its movements lacking vim,

  its screech the desperate braking of a soon-to-be-derailed express.

  ‘Silly boy,’ she said, reversing. ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow, same time.’

  Having deposited, she thought, my underwear in a left luggage locker.

  He grinned, wondering where his uncle and cousins were; and would be

  the next day. Roger at his office near St Pancras, Lily

  and Jez blowing out clouds of skunk in the park?

  The wasp manages to jab the spider’s belly with its stinger

  and in a single tug is free, a sentient yellow-and-black

  bullet racketing past them to the station exit.

  And Looking Back

  A. F. Harrold

  Sometimes a hand in or of or from the past can make us come

  alive again without our realising what it is that’s being done.

  And sometimes bodies find their ways from where they each began,

  a surprise curving into the present, into the light, under the hand,

  and without warning or comment everything on hold has suddenly begun

  and now, it seems, this is not as bad as it could possibly have become

  and for a while there’s only time and flesh to pass before the rising sun.

  And it happens that tonight is a night picked from a hundred and one

  other possible nights, each spinning lost between the stars in the silence from

  the closing mouths of kisses and answers and the lover’s tongue

  to the morning that in the end is well known to always come.

  And looking back what is there that has not yet been remarked upon,

  the resistance of memory to education of any form,

  or the ritual days of living that nights like this can pluck us from?

  Explode

  John Etchingham

  It’s the way that you say ‘I don’t usually do this’

  And seeing your pain all the time mixed with such bliss,

  Initial resistance both mental and physical,

  Tightness that gives way to depths almost mystical;

  Slowly at first, just until you get used to me –

  Pushing, I feel you relax so deliciously,

  Urging me on I try not to let go, but who

  Could keep control? I just have to explode in you.

  The Man in the Print Room

  Sarah Salway

  Now if he’s slow and she gets upset

  he’ll move towards her, tease the hair

  from her face, lick her tears away.

  She lets him tie the straps on her new ankle boots,

  teaches him to pull her corset just tight enough,

  has sewn fifty pearl buttons on a black sheath dress

  he presses into her skin like the photocopier code.

  All day she hugs the thought of him close,

  how he knows the word of more in every tongue.

  La Noche Oscura

  San Juan de la Cruz

  En una noche oscura,

  con ansias en amores inflamada,

  (¡oh dichosa ventura!)

  salí sin ser notada,

  estando ya mi casa sosegada.

  A oscuras y segura,

  por la secreta escala disfrazada,

  (¡oh dichosa ventura!)

  a oscuras y en celada,

  estando ya mi casa sosegada.

  En la noche dichosa,

  en secreto, que nadie me veía,

  ni yo miraba cosa,

  sin otra luz ni guía

  sino la que en el corazón ardía.

  Aquésta me guïaba

  más cierta que la luz del mediodía,

  adonde me esperaba

  quien yo bien me sabía,

  en parte donde nadie parecía.

  ¡Oh noche que me guiaste!,

  ¡oh noche amable más que el alborada!,

  ¡oh noche que juntaste

  amado con amada,

  amada en el amado transformada!

  En mi pecho florido,

  que entero para él solo se guardaba,

  allí quedó dormido,

  y yo le regalaba,

  y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.

  El aire de la almena,

  cuando yo sus cabellos esparcía,

  con su mano serena

  en mi cuello hería,

  y todos mis sentidos suspendía.

  Quedéme y olvidéme,

  el rostro recliné sobre el amado,

  cesó todo, y dejéme,

  dejando mi cuidado

  entre las azucenas olvidado.

  Dark Night

  On a dark night,

  Kindled in love with yearnings

  – oh, happy chance! –

  I went forth without being observed,

  My house being now at rest.

  In darkness and secure,

  By the secret ladder, disguised

  – oh, happy chance! –

  In darkness and in concealment,

  My house being now at rest.

  In the happy night,

  In secret, when none saw me,

  Nor I beheld aught,

  Without light or guide,

  save that which burned in my heart.

  This light guided me

  More surely than the light of noonday

  To the place where he

  (well I knew who!) was awaiting me –

  A place where none appeared.

  Oh, night that guided me,

  Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,

  Oh, night that joined

  Beloved with lover,

  Lover transformed in the Beloved!

  Upon my flowery breast,

  Kept wholly for himself alone,

  There he stayed sleeping,

  and I caressed him,

  And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

  The breeze blew from the turret

  As I parted his locks;

  With his gentle hand

/>   He wounded my neck

  And caused all my senses to be suspended.

  I remained, lost in oblivion;

  My face I reclined on the Beloved.

  All ceased and I abandoned myself,

  Leaving my cares

  forgotten among the lilies.

  i like my body

  e. e. cummings

  i like my body when it is with your

  body. It is so quite new a thing.

  Muscles better and nerves more.

  i like your body. i like what it does,

  i like its hows. i like to feel the spine

  of your body and its bones, and the trembling

  -firm-smooth ness and which i will

  again and again and again

  kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,

  i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz

  of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes

  over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs,

  and possibly i like the thrill

  of under me you so quite new

  Ur Thurs Reidh Ansur

  Ros Barber

  To you, I taste like sin; tobacco and alcohol

  mingling hot-foul and exotic. I get you drunk

  against your better judgement, and as I lead you

  out, you sway, say no, giddy with the inevitable.

  You like beaches? I’ve made love by the Med,

  the Channel, the North Atlantic. Then you

  follow me onto the abandoned shingle,

  the daylight biting your retina. It is too cold