last updated October 15, 2005 (home)

Holy geez. It's been a year and a half since I updated this nonsense. Nonsense! Should you be looking to contact me, call my mother.

Wow! Women in the shadows - Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection.

December 18, 2002

The newest addition is actually hidden away on the text page. It's a short story by Haruki Murakami. Sadly, the link isn't saved. It was interesting to notice his name in a list of writers of magical realism (the trek started with a drawing, led to 'the briar rose', and continued with magical realism..) Anyway, here's another story by Haruki Murakami and an essay on the history of magic realism. More stories by Murakami.

December 11, 2002

Two poems this time around. 'To Have Without Holding' is unforgivably smarmy, but it examines a theme the last two poems shared.. All three examine isolation, chosing to break emotional barriers, and finding a balance between keeping your own company and others'. Piercy's is the last in that vein. 'Sappho' is simply yummy. It comes from Terri Windling's Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts. There's an article about Sleeping Beauty's forty days of 'sexual relations' that's very nifty, as well..

Sappho
Cory-Ellen Nadel (? - present)

Call me sailor before poet.
In sweet dark coves I shipwrecked,
crashed with a passion into her salt
and smooth sand body.

It was something in her hips, in the brown
motion and the swaying. Something
that drew me to the hollows of her,
my laughing wild girl.

Her singing calls me now from sleep.
Draws me back to the rocks, and the wet tongues
licking my footprints away. Kneeling in the ephemeral
shape of the shoreline, my eyes are filled with wind-whipped tears,
my mouth with the memory of dark hair tangled
between her siren lips and mine.

To Have Without Holding
Marge Piercy (? - present)

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say, it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
you float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

November 24, 2002

Well. Apparently something NEW has happened, as I'm changing the format of the random page (plus--it hasn't been a year since the last update). The latest poem comes from the following site: Innerspace Unlimited - Poetry

Nothing
Margaret Atwood (1939 - present)

Nothing like love to put blood
back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks and shards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone and liquid fishegg, desert
and saltmarsh, a green push
out of death. The vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softening pebbles as around skin. The sky's
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. It tastes of
salt. What touches you is what you touch.

November 3, 2002

Wow! Almost a year since the last update. Someone (other than me) must look at this page sometime in the next year, right? Right. So I'll pass along this amazingly nifty website: Jeanette Winterson - The Official Website Check out the poem of the month.

Cinderella
Olga Broumas (1949 - present)

      . . .the joy that isn't shared
      I heard, dies young.
            --Anne Sexton, 1928-1974

Apart from my sisters, estranged
from my mother, I am a woman alone
in a house of men
who secretly
call themselves princes, alone
with me usually, under cover of dark. I am the one allowed in

to the royal chambers, whose small foot conveniently
fills the slipper of glass. The woman writer, the lady
umpire, the madam chairman, anyone's wife.
I know what I know.
And I once was glad

of the chance to use it, even alone
in a strange castle doing overtime on my own, cracking
the royal code. The princes spoke
in their father's language, were eager to praise me
my nimble tongue. I am a woman in a state of siege, alone
as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline a
mile long. A woman co-opted by promises: the lure
of a job, the ruse of a choice, a woman forced
to bear witness, falsely
against my own kind, as each
other sister was judge inadequate, bitchy, incompetent,
jealous, too thin, too fat. I know what I know.
What sweet bread I make

for myself in this prosperous house
is dirty, what good soup I boil turns
in my mouth to mud. Give
me my ashes. A cold stove, a cinder-block pillow, wet
canvas shoes in my sisters', my sisters' hut. Or I swear

I'll die young
like those favored before me, hand-picked each one
For her joyful heart.