The Poetry of Sex (8 page)
Authors: Sophie Hannah
Tags: #Poetry, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Health & Fitness, #Sexuality
Neil Rollinson
Insatiable these mornings, full
of a drunk excitement, your eyes
have the glazed look of a woman
who hasn’t slept all night; you wake me
with mouth open kisses, the smell
of a different room in your clothes.
You take off your dress and show me
the stains on your skin
like the trails of exotic gastropods;
a body paint of semen
which I rehydrate with my tongue.
I trace the splash across your stomach
and over your breast, a thick dried
river of it, flooding again; your nipple
rough with a smear of salt.
That was one hell of a shot.
I suck on you greedily and slide
my tongue where his own tongue
must have slid long into the night,
and when all trace of him is gone,
except the smell in your hair
we make our own maps on each other’s skins
and we fuck like we never do
without this heat inside you, without
this ghost of a man drifting between us
like a lover sharing our bed.
Elizabeth Barrett
Nineteen days without you when I woke,
one morning, full with what I lacked;
laid in the bath finding evidence
of your absence and my neglect.
I shaved my underarms and legs,
plucked my eyebrows, shaped my pubes
and used my tiny scissors to snip
an errant hair. I paid attention again
to detail; tried to look at my body
the way you would − knowing
that I would drive out, that day,
to find you − that after our frantic urgency,
or that slowed motion when (somehow)
you trip it and we keep going on
and on − knowing that, after this,
you would examine every inch of me,
your blue-gray eyes drunk with it,
you rolling that one word around
your mouth like a jelly bean:
gorgeous,
gorgeous. You’re so gorgeous …
Later, you take my right breast
between your teeth, skim your tongue
across my nipple, ask:
Where’s it gone?
I miss it. There was just a single one.
Rhian Gallagher
Unshowered, wrestling with the sea still on our skin
when she catches me, mid-room, with a kiss.
Not a passing glance of lips, but her intended
till I press back against the wall
laughing, in a body-search pose
as ready as her to forget about dinner.
Once, in our first months, we headed down Christopher Street
starch wafting from an open laundry, the sound of a press
squeezing a line along a sleeve. We slipped
across the West Side Highway, out on the pier
pressing our faces to the fence to catch an air of sea,
distant Liberty. Winter sun pouring its heart out
over the Hudson, she stepped into me –
the cold became a memory
smudged under our winter coats.
Two guys stood on the far side of the pier
looking baffled, how long they’d been there
god knows. Gulping, knees undone, we surfaced like swimmers
and almost ran back up Christopher Street
laughing. We’d been gone an hour, the night had come
there were shelves of lights up and down the tall streets,
she was all over me. Everything had turned on.
Sharon Olds
After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Neil Rollinson
I crack the shell
on the bedstead and open it
over your stomach. It runs
to your navel and settles there
like the stone of a sharon fruit.
You ask me to gather it up
and pour it over your breast
without breaking the membrane.
It swims in my palm, drools
from the gaps in my fingers, fragrant,
spotted with blood.
It slips down your chest,
moves on your skin like a woman
hurrying in her yellow dress, the long
transparent train dragging behind.
It slides down your belly and into your
pubic hair where you burst
the yolk with a tap of your finger.
It covers your cunt in a shock
of gold. You tell me to eat,
to feel the sticky glair on my tongue.
I lick the folds of your sex, the coarse
damp hairs, the slopes of your arse
until you’re clean, and tense as a clock spring.
I touch your spot and something inside you
explodes like the blowing of birds’ eggs.
Dan Burt
Will you reconnoitre after lunch,
Alone, mobile in hand for an urban
Nook from which to call where you
Will not be seen or heard, masking
Your aim like a jihadi, pleading
Exercise rather than Asr prayers?
If so, when you find a spot and press
The green key will blue paper catch
Sparking a blast across the sea?
Muslim martyrs are no different,
Dear, from you and me; sweet success
Will shatter both our worlds,
Though we may be more certain
Than they what our desserts will be.
Patience Agbabi
At twelve I learnt about The Fall,
had rough-cut daydreams based on original sin,
nightmares about the swarm of thin-
lipped, foul-mouthed, crab apple-
masticating girls who’d chase me full
throttle: me, slipping on wet leaves, a heroine
in a black-and-white cliché; them, buzzing on nicotine
and the sap of French kisses. I hated big school
but even more, I hated the lurid shame
of surrender, the yellow miniskirt
my mother wore the day that that man
drove my dad’s car to collect me. She called my name
softly, more seductive than an advert.
I heard the drone of the engine, turned and ran.
John Saunders
I undress your innocence,
watched by the apostle of temperance
you kiss my lips, whisper –
this is us.
We make love in the company of guilt,
shelter weakness in our hearts,
give safety to dangerous thoughts
and throw them to the pool of fate.
I believe every story it suggests,
dine on fine wines and purple dust.
This is the memory of our fading space,
a threadbare blanket of feeling –
every choice we make, a loss of freedom.
We dance in time to waltzes and tangos,
capture our history in mirrors of gold.
Emily Dickinson
For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.
For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.
Gaius Petronius
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport:
Let us not then rush blindly on unto it,
Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it:
For lust will languish, and that heat decay.
But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday,
Let us together closely lie and kiss,
There is no labour, nor no shame in this;
This hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never
Can this decay, but is beginning ever.
Trans. Ben Jonson
Adam Horovitz
i
After the Wedding
Dreamt of you again last night,
your smiling face pushed close to mine;
caught between mirrors, a squeezebox
of repeats cluttering the line.
I thought as we were twitter-pressed
like sausage meat inside new skins
how little’s known of what we love
hate and how compression bins
our excess dreams and sears off
the vowels of love; the consonants
of hurt are all that’s left intact.
How does a lover thrive? Expanse!
No questing after jagged and reductive fact
but after puffball spores and seedlings of romance.
The Bride Has Taken the Vwls & Lft th Bldng
Drmt f y gn lst nt
yr :) pshd cls 2 mn;
cght btwn mrrrs, sqzbx
f rpts clttrng th ln.
Thght s w wr twttr-prssd
lke ssg mt nsd nw skns
hw lttl’s knwn f wht w ♥
ht & hw cmprssn bns
r xs drms & srs ff
th vwls f ♥; th cnsnnts
f hrt r ll tht’s lft ntct.
Hw ds lvr thrv? Xpns!
Nt qstng ftr jggd & rdctv fct
bt ftr pffbll sprs & sdlngs f rmnc.
The Bride in Her Lover’s Bed
ea o ou aai a i,
ou ii ae ue oe o ie;
au eee io a ueeeo
o eea uei e ie.
i ou a e ee ie-ee
ie auae ea iie e i
o ie o o a e oe
ae a o oeio i
ou ee ea a ea o
e oe o oe e ooa
o u ae a a e ia.
o oe a oe ie? Eae!
o uei ae ae a euie a
u ae ua oe a eei o oae.
Julia Copus
We don’t fall in love: it rises through us
the way that certain music does –
whether a symphony or ballad –
and it is sepia-coloured,
like spilt tea that inches up
the tiny tube-like gaps inside
a cube of sugar lying by a cup.
Yes, love’s like that: just when we least
needed or expected it
a part of us dips into it
by chance or mishap and it seeps
through our capillaries, it clings
inside the chambers of the heart.
We’re victims, we say: mere vessels,
drinking the vanilla scent
of this one’s skin, the lustre
of another’s eyes so skilfully
darkened with bistre. And whatever
damage might result we’re not
to blame for it: love is an autocrat
and won’t be disobeyed.
Sometimes we manage
to convince ourselves of that.
Gavin Ewart
Eve is madly in love with Hugh
And Hugh is keen on Jim.
Charles is in love with very few
And few are in love with him.
Myra sits typing notes of love
With romantic pianist’s fingers.
Dick turns his eyes to the heavens above
Where Fran’s divine perfume lingers.
Nicky is rolling eyes and tits
And flaunting her wiggly walk.
Everybody is thrilled to bits
By Clive’s suggestive talk.
Sex suppressed will go berserk,
But it keeps us all alive.
It’s a wonderful change from wives and work
And it ends at half past five.
Hugo Williams
You paused for a moment and I heard you smoking
on the other end of the line.
I pictured your expression,
one eye screwed shut against the smoke
as you waited for my reaction.
I was waiting for it myself, a list of my own news
gone suddenly cold in my hand.
Supposing my wife found out, what would happen then?
Would I have to leave her and marry you now?
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad,
starting again with someone new, finding a new place,
pretending the best was yet to come.
It might even be fun,
playing the family man, walking around in the park
full of righteous indignation.
But no, I couldn’t go through all that again,
not without my own wife being there,
not without her getting cross about everything.
Perhaps she wouldn’t mind about the baby,
then we could buy a house in the country
and all move in together.
That sounded like a better idea.
Now that I’d been caught at last, a wave of relief
swept over me. I was just considering
a shed in the garden with a radio and a day bed,
when I remembered I hadn’t seen you for over a year.
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘When’s it due?’