Featuring Poems by:
Judith Barrington
Tamiko Beyer
Sharon Bridgforth
Ching-in Chen
Elizabeth Colen
Sharon Deevey
Beatrix Gates
Jewelle Gomez
Elsa Gidlow
Carol Guess
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Marilyn Hacker
Susan Hawthorne
Eloise Klein Healy
Joan Larkin
Audre Lorde
Anne MacKay
Janet Mason
Charlotte Mew
Pat Parker
Adrienne Rich
Muriel Rukeyser
SapphoRuth L. Schwartz
Maureen Seaton
SJ Sindu
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Chocolate Waters$6.00

Fall 2010

Dedicated to Fran Day, her memory is a blessing.

Sinister Wisdom 81

Lesbian Poetry–When? And Now!

Sinister Wisdom

Lesbian Poetry–
When? And Now!

81

Publisher: Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

Sinister Wisdom 81
Fall 2010

Editors: Julie R. Enszer & Merry Gangemi
Issue Editor: Julie R. Enszer
Layout and Design: Julie R. Enszer
Board of Directors: Shaba Barnes, Fran Day, Susan Levinkind, Joan
Nestle, Rose Provenzano, Judith K. Witherow
Office Manager: Susan Levinkind
Proofreaders: Merry Gangemi, Gib Gibson
Web Design: Sue Lenaerts and Amy WinterSpecial thanks to: All of the womyn who contributed work in its many
forms, our readers, and our supporters in the journey.
Front Cover Art: Charzette Torrence
SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976
Former editors and publishers:
Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines)
and Catherine Nicholson (1976-1981)
Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981-1983)
Michaele Uccella (1983-1984)
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983-1987)
Elana Dykewomon (1987-1994)
Caryatis Cardea (1991-1994)
Akiba Onada-Sikwoia (1995-1997)
Margo Mercedes Rivera-Weiss (1997-2000)
Fran Day (2004-2010)
Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural, multi-class, female-born lesbian
space. We seek to open, consider and advance the exploration ofcommunity issues. We recognize the power of language to reflect our
diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical
judgment, as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.
Statements made and opinions expressed in this publication do notnecessarily reflect the views of the publisher, board members, or
editor(s) of Sinister Wisdom.
Copyright © 2010 Sinister Wisdom, Inc.
All rights revert to individual authors and artists. Copyrightacknowledgements continue on p. 107.
ISSN: 0196-1853. Printed in the U. S. on recycled paper.
Sinister Wisdom, Inc. PO Box 3252, Berkeley, CA 94703, USA
This issue is dedicated in loving memory to Fran Day.

Fall 2010 1

Table of Contents
NOTES FOR A MAGAZINE ...................................................................................5
SAPPHO, TRANSLATION BY SUSAN HAWTHORNE ....................................7
FRAGMENT 16...........................................................................................................7
SUSAN HAWTHORNE.............................................................................................8
WHAT ANAKTORIA SAYS TO HER .............................................................................8

ELOISE KLEIN HEALY..........................................................................................9
ARTEMIS TO APHRODITE .........................................................................................9
CATHERINE MCNEIL ..........................................................................................10
AFTERWORDS ..........................................................................................................10

SHARON DEEVEY .................................................................................................11
IN CELEBRATION OF LESBIAN DESIRE ...................................................................11
RUTH L. SCHWARTZ ...........................................................................................13
JANUARY VINEYARDS ............................................................................................13
SHARON DEEVEY .................................................................................................14
COME DANCE WITH ME ...........................................................................................14

JEWELLE GOMEZ ................................................................................................15
A PARTING .............................................................................................................15
SHARON DEEVEY .................................................................................................16
EX’ES IN PUBLIC......................................................................................................16

ELSA GIDLOW........................................................................................................17
OF FORBIDDEN LOVE (1960) .................................................................................17
MEG TORWL...........................................................................................................18
BLUE (1998) ...........................................................................................................18
ELSA GIDLOW........................................................................................................20
THE ARTIST (1922) ................................................................................................20
ADRIENNE BRADLEY ..........................................................................................22
THE POET (1998)....................................................................................................22
ELSA GIDLOW........................................................................................................23
LOVE’S ACOLYTE (1919).......................................................................................23

2 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

MEG TORWL...........................................................................................................24
JE T'ADORE (1999)..................................................................................................24
ELSA GIDLOW........................................................................................................25
TO THE UNKNOWN GODDESS (1918).....................................................................25
MEG TORWL...........................................................................................................26
MOUNTAIN (1998)..................................................................................................26
SHARON BRIDGFORTH ......................................................................................27
AND/FREEDOM IS MY NAME ...................................................................................27

CHING-IN CHEN ....................................................................................................28
LOVE WITH THE CHINESE LION DANCER...............................................................28
SHARON BRIDGFORTH ......................................................................................29
EXCERPT FROM LOVVE/RITUALS & RAGE ..............................................................29
CHING-IN CHEN ....................................................................................................32
BAG OF PLASTER ....................................................................................................32
ANNE MACKAY......................................................................................................33
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY GOES TO A GAY BAR...............................................33
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY.............................................................................34
EVENING ON LESBOS ..............................................................................................34
ANNE MACKAY......................................................................................................35
GERTRUDE AND ALICE SEATED IN THEIR ATELIER, 1923 ....................................35
GERTRUDE STEIN ................................................................................................36
DEAR MRS. .............................................................................................................36
TAMIKO BEYER ....................................................................................................37
THE LOVE POEM.....................................................................................................37
ADRIENNE RICH ...................................................................................................39
THE IMAGES ...........................................................................................................39
TAMIKO BEYER ....................................................................................................42
FROM BOUGH BREAKS..............................................................................................42

AUDRE LORDE.......................................................................................................43
LOVE POEM ............................................................................................................43
AUDRE LORDE.......................................................................................................44
POWER ....................................................................................................................44

Fall 2010 3

ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS ..................................................................................46
MOTHEROURSELVES ...............................................................................................46

TONI P. BROWN .....................................................................................................48
FROM THE CLEMENTINE POEMS ..............................................................................48

JANET MASON .......................................................................................................49
FROM A WOMAN ALONE POEMS ................................................................................49

SJ SINDU...................................................................................................................50
COCOON..................................................................................................................50
PAT PARKER...........................................................................................................52
EXODUS (TO MY HUSBANDS, LOVERS) ..................................................................52
CAROL GUESS........................................................................................................53
HESPERIDIUM .........................................................................................................53
ELIZABETH COLEN .............................................................................................54
DES OEUFS ..........................................................................................................54
MURIEL RUKEYSER ............................................................................................55
WHAT DO I GIVE YOU? .........................................................................................55
MURIEL RUKEYSER ............................................................................................56
THE TRANSGRESS ...................................................................................................56
BEATRIX GATES ...................................................................................................57
FROM DOS...............................................................................................................57

JOAN LARKIN ........................................................................................................63
THE FIRE .................................................................................................................63
BEATRIX GATES ...................................................................................................64
CONDITIONS ...........................................................................................................64
CAROLYN GAGE ...................................................................................................65
FOR RACHEL CRITES ..............................................................................................65
CHARLOTTE MEW ...............................................................................................67
ABSENCE ................................................................................................................67
CHARLOTTE MEW ...............................................................................................68
THE CHANGELING ..................................................................................................68
CHOCOLATE WATERS........................................................................................71
DISTURBANCE ........................................................................................................71

4 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

CHOCOLATE WATERS........................................................................................73
SCRATCH SCRATCH (A PERFORMANCE POEM)........................................................73

SANDRA H. TARLIN..............................................................................................75
THE GOOD TIMES ARE COMING ............................................................................75
ADRIENNE RICH ...................................................................................................76
WHEN WE ARE SHAKEN OUT ..................................................................................76
MERRY GANGEMI ................................................................................................77
INVITATION.............................................................................................................77
MARILYN HACKER ..............................................................................................82
SONNET 21 FROM LOVE, DEATH, AND THE CHANGING OF THE SEASONS ...............82
JUDITH BARRINGTON ........................................................................................83
THE DYKE WITH NO NAME DOESN’T REALLY THINK ABOUT SEX ..83
JUDITH BARRINGTON ........................................................................................84
FROM THE WILD................................................................................................84
JOAN LARKIN ........................................................................................................85
SUMMONS ...........................................................................................................85
JUDY GRAHN..........................................................................................................86
SLOWLY: A PLAINSONG FROM AN OLDER WOMAN TO A YOUNGER WOMAN .........86
AMY LOWELL AND MAUREEN SEATON ......................................................88
THE AMY POEMS ....................................................................................................88
AMY LOWELL ........................................................................................................88
STILL LIFE MOONLIGHT STRIKING UPON A CHESS-BOARD .................................88
MAUREEN SEATON ..............................................................................................88
STILL LIFE MALCOLM BITING UPON MY LEFT ANKLE ........................................88
AMY LOWELL ........................................................................................................89
CARREFOUR ............................................................................................................89
MAUREEN SEATON ..............................................................................................89
CHICAGO.................................................................................................................89
QUEER STUDY (IN RED) .........................................................................................90
QUEER STUDY (IN BLUE) .......................................................................................92
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES ........................................................................95
IN MEMORIAM ....................................................................................................106
ADVERTISEMENTS.............................................................................................108

Fall 2010 5

NOTES FOR A MAGAZINE
While I was working on this issue of Sinister Wisdom,
Lesbian Poetry – When? And Now?, I was also beginning myresearch for my dissertation. August 2010 found me at the Sallie
Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke
University looking at the papers of Catherine Nicholson. Nicholson,
as you may recognize from the pages of Sinister Wisdom, was one of
the founders of Sinister Wisdom with her partner, Harriet
Ellenberger (aka Desmoines). Sifting through boxes, folders, andpapers from Nicholson, I was filled with awe about the history ofSinister Wisdom and inspired by the commitment and excitementthat wimmin have brought to this magazine as editors, contributors,
and volunteers. I hope you will feel something similar while reading
this issue.
Lesbian Poetry – When? And Now? reflects my belief
that lesbian poets have been in dialogue with one another, directly
and indirectly for decades. This issue brings together a variety ofcontemporary lesbian poets, most of whom have paired their workwith a “lesbian poet of yore.” Many people inquired about what I
meant by “lesbian poet of yore;” I confess I was cagey in myresponses to them, not wanting to proscribe what I meant, but moreinterested in what creative responses womyn had to the call forpoems. As always, I was gratified by lesbian creativity.
Lesbian Poetry – When? And Now? begins with atranslation by Susan Hawthorne of a fragment by Sappho. Sappho’s“Fragment 16” is followed by three contemporary poets responding
to Sappho: Susan Hawthorne, Eloise Klein Healy, and Catherine
McNeil. After this invocation to our Sapphic foremother, the poets
and the poets to whom they respond vary widely. You’ll find poems
from Jewelle Gomez, Elsa Gidlow, Sharon Bridgforth, Gertrude
Stein, Tamiko Beyer, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Joan Larkin, anddozens of others in these pages. I thank all of the women who
submitted to this issue and who graciously allowed their work to be
included in the issue. I find the poems in this issue to be an exciting
dialogue among lesbians in poetry. I hope that you will as well.
While assembling this issue of Sinister Wisdom, Fran Day
asked me if I would take over as editor of Sinister Wisdom. This wasa hard decision because I have been so impressed by the time, care,
and attention that Fran gave to stewarding the journal over the last
six years. Her dedication and commitment to Sinister Wisdom, andby extension to the entire lesbian community, has been
extraordinary. Her sudden death in September 2010 shocked and6 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

saddened me; I hope each of you reading this will find a way tohonor Fran’s life and work in a meaningful way. Honestly, whenFran asked me about becoming editor, I didn’t know if I could walkin her shoes—or the shoes of any of the other editors who have been
responsible for these pages and this institution. I only agreed to do
it after my good friend, Merry Gangemi, agreed to work with me asa co-editor of Sinister Wisdom. We are both excited to be a part ofSinister Wisdom for the future. We are certain that there will besome rocky moments during this transition and along the way, but
we hope that we will find the journey, the conversations, and thecultural visions sustain us and Sinister Wisdom. Thank you forreading Sinister Wisdom and being part of this community—andplease stay around for the conversation and find a way to contributeto the community and to this institution.
In sisterhood and struggle,
Julie R. Enszer

Fall 2010 7

Sappho, Translation by Susan Hawthorne

Fragment 16

some say an army of horses some say an army of feetsome say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on this black earth but I say it’s whomever you loveeasy to make this thought catchfor she who was more beautiful
than all of humanity
left her sublime husband behindto sail to Troyneither children nor loved parents
could she perceive
but deceived – she wentforlightly
recall to me now Anaktoria
no longer here

Translator Note: This is one of Sappho’s best-known poems. I first readit as grafitti on a toilet wall in an inner urban suburb of Melbourne in the
mid-1970s. Underground poetry always survives. Between then and 1979
when I began studying Ancient Greek a whole new world opened for me.
But it’s really only now that I appreciate the craft of Sappho’s poems.

8 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Susan Hawthorne
what Anaktoria says to her

when the herds are running the ground thrumming
sunlight scaling every beam of dust like a hordeon the move your finest poems are for me
that’s what I love bestwhen the sun strikes your coat roan with heat
we all stand dazzled by your beautyand none of us will ever abandon you
you the brightest of us allwhen the summer grass grows pale
and the longing strikes up again
I think of you standing always knowing
which way to go
your doubts are few your face dewy
in the morning light and your eyesbrown soft but your glance as sharp
as thorns
so Sappho let me follow you on this track
into that thicket by the river
let us stand flank by flank our love
our armour

Fall 2010 9

Eloise Klein Healy
Artemis To Aphrodite
The Parthenon—East Frieze panel #856
Apollo, Poseidon, Artemis, Aphrodite

OK, I know about the sparrows
in the dust, the storm of their arrival,
or love like a storm of arrivaland a flight of birds.
I’m the one supposed to be the hard lover,but even with your sweet smile
and winning ways,
even with your promises
and devotion,
look here-my arm stretching to touch
your shoulder,
you’ve made it stonewhere a moment ago the folds of your garment
were running grass andyou were turning to greet me.

10 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Catherine McNeil
afterwordsi.

sweet country in which i found my homethe sound of your hairfalling over your cheeksii.

you'd wake me up
nights in the middle“do you love me?”child words
meant for motheriii.

memory, my (re)course
the past / still lifebanking coals in the wood stoveno light left

iv.

i could (not) have loved you morewanting my love as it wascabin f(or)everv.

honey/suckle me
open up like your thighs, full<occupy the whole> of / words
slide
in-between
my mouthvi.

and earEroserosionFall 2010 11

Sharon Deevey
In Celebration of Lesbian Desire
I myself might be considered a lesbian poet of yore,
now reemerging after forty years in the hinterlands of Ohio,
the workplace, illness, and survival. When I came out at age
26, every lesbian I knew wrote poetry. First, make love to a
woman, next, write a poem – they were two parts of the same
experience. I published my few poems of yore in The Furies,
and in Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution, the small
newspapers and pamphlets with which we hoped to change
the world.
Forty years later, I am writing poetry again, andcompiling scattered verses from my lifetime of journals for a
project at the local, quite heterosexual senior center. In the
Ohio State University Library, I find generations of lesbian
poetry in the open stacks. I borrow the slim gem, Gerry
Pearlberg’s Zenith of Desire: Contemporary [in 1996]
Lesbian Poems About Sex (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.,
1996.) I choose a poem I love, “January Vineyards” by Ruth L.
Schwartz, and find her website.
Can I ask Ruth, twenty years my junior, to be my“lesbian poet of yore”? What is old, or young, of yore, or now?
Lesbian age has always confused me, as I learned as a memberof Old Lesbians Organizing for Change. At 65, I am younger
than many other OLOC members, who are mostly 70-90.
Because I came out at a younger age, however, I feel older as alesbian than the chronologically older OLOC lesbians whocame out in midlife or later.
Careers and creativity also vary in relative age. Ruth
has a significant poetry publishing history, while I, starting
anew after an early dabble, am a beginner in poetic craft.
I pair Ruth’s 1996 poem with my 2010 poem, “comedance with me” -- to celebrate the surprising persistence of

12 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

desire through aging, illness, and near death, anytime right up
to the very end.
In my life, the persistence of break-ups has been
companion to the persistence of desire. I have aspired not to
gay marriage, but rather to truth and courage, respecting thepainful ending of desire. In Debra Riggin Waugh’s
wonderfully titled book, Ex-Lover Weird Shit (Takoma Park,
MD: Two Out of Three Sisters Press, 1994), I find “A Parting”
by Jewelle Gomez, and pair it with my recent “ex’es in public.”
I heard Jewelle speak at Ohio State, probably twenty years
ago, the first woman I heard introduced as a lesbian poet. She
said the most radical way to change the world is to return toyour high school reunion as an open lesbian, which I did.
In academic reviews of lesbian poetry, I see discussion
about the ambiguous subjects of erotic poems written by
women of unknown sexual orientation. I realize that thelesbian poems I’ve written all these years to my beloved“you’s” could, astonishingly, if standing alone, be perceived as
written to men. My years of militant lesbian self-disclosure,
my marching in the streets will disappear, if only my poems
and my name survive. I wrote to “you” without thinking tolabel my words by gender, because lesbian life has become sonormal, so open, more like breathing or going to the grocery
store than like politics and confrontation. Maybe I need toinsert new words into the space where others have a middle
name. If I aspire to be a contemporary lesbian poet, I willneed to become Sharon Womenlovingwoman Deevey, for all
posterity to see.

Fall 2010 13

Ruth L. Schwartz
January Vineyards

How our bodies fail to confine our longings,
even in death’s season, withholding nothing
How the hills furrow like a cherished body,leaning into the opened hand of the lake
How the brittle grapevines braid the fields
How the vagina clenches, prayerfullyaround the fingers which have entered it
How the canopy of leaves will bless the fruit,each grape soft and ready for the mouth
Sex was going to be the landscapewhich would make our bodies perfect,
and it has
How savagely I want you, even here,on the white stretcher, in the pallid hospital14 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Sharon Deevey
come dance with me

suddenly, you burst
into my daydreams
after years of casual contact
your smile
a pool of sunlightin deep winteryou stand six inches away
and I shakecurrents crackle
in the air between us
I watchthe flick of your kickas you turn the cornerof the Bosa Nova
you invite me
and I begin
to rearrange
my calendar

Fall 2010 15

Jewelle Gomez
A PartingWe sit across a table.
She demands I say
the things I always
have trouble saying:
How I feel about loving her
about not loving her.
On my tongue
is only the knowledge that I can’t
open my mouth
except to eat the sandwich
I’ve safely ordered.
I watch her hands move on the cup,
her slim fingers press the tea bag.
They are still the ones I want to feel on my skin
Her eyes filling with tears
are still the pale lightthat pulled me inside and held me warm.
The plaintive song of her voiceis the same: pulling me
pushing me.
I want to make promises
I won’t keep.
Instead I am silent.
Eatingas she demands
I say how I feel.

16 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Sharon Deevey
ex’es in public
after writing group, you stop melean toward me and say“now that wasn’t painful, was it!”ouch, ouch, ouch, I flinch
and stammer like a wimp
“I guess it was OK”
I hear your statement not as a question
but instead as firm pronouncement
implying you were right (of course)
insisting there’s no reason for concern
about our public meetings
I still wish you’d ask me
how did you feel?
what was hard?
what helped?
your words remind me, if I protest
much less show you full-blown
anger, sadness, grief
you will once again so quickly label me:“oversensitive!” “overreacting!”
maybe true, dear one, but I have seen you
let suppressed emotion leaklater, always later
unexpectedly, sideways, zapping us both
I feel off-balance, always off-balancewith youwhy have I not yet given up
the hope of friendship?

Fall 2010 17

Elsa Gidlow
Of Forbidden Love (1960)
We send word to one another:
wonderWhat meets but our words:
Reach hand to hand
groping
For contact, touch,Signaling recognition.
Eyes, an instant unveiled,question:
Who am I
For you?
Together Apart
The space andAntennae

alwaysIn the night of our days
In light
In laughter grief
Antennae: exploring:
Are you there
Are you shadow
Or fleshed being
Of the long seeing?
Are you she

18 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Meg Torwl
Blue (1998)

on the pavement
the evening we met ended
drawing imaginary mapsof the world
so I could know
where you livethen
it was you
you I chasedaround the botanical gardens
hanging on your every word
you olderso full of energy
I younger
dragging my feetbetween sticks
I can’t take my eyes
off youbehind yours
I see
a million oscillating dots
each onea thought or idea
sparking me
like we could speak
for years
and still
have just begun
synchronicity:
i take homein my pocket
a lemon verbena leaf

Fall 2010 19

you casually rubbed
between your fingers
for me to smell
my favourite tea
we are thelast ones leftlying on the grass
green cladletting our blue sky minds
drift byyou give mea lift home
we drink lemon bliss tea
speak passionatelyof mountains and spirituality
maybe they are
the same?
next time last time
i see youswopping photos
some hugs and kisses
lemon imagine dessert
dried persimmonsand sage tea
please tell me
this isn’t all
there will ever be…?

20 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Elsa Gidlow
The Artist (1922)
Let us leave off Loving, My Lady
You have kissed me Grey
And still I have no peace.
We thought we could make the night
A tapestry of passion.
Dear Love, what a vain caprice.
Where’s the immortal design
We thought we had splashed on the indigo cloth?
And where is the cloth?
Dawn is forever the cynic.
She shows us love is the flame,
Our flesh the eternal moth.
My Lady, loose me and rise.
We are brief as apple blossom
And I am heart-chilled with thought of the end.
Creation is all.
The hours are thieves, Time a beggar,
And we have little to spend.
I ache for the brush in my hand.
The thrall of the compliant pigment
Governs my blood.
I will paint you, My Lady,
The afterlove glow in your face.
I would deify you, if I could
With enchantments of color,
Bind you with fetters of terrible beauty,
Fast to my canvas forever.
Give you the eternity God has denied you,Bind you to life with art’s sacred chains
That death can not sever.

Fall 2010 21

Love has betrayed us enough with its treacherous wonder.
Let us go now, while we ache with the magic,
Or what is the gain?
Art is our one immortality.
All we win from the gods
In exchange for our labor and pain.

22 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Adrienne Bradley
The Poet (1998)

poetry seduces
loose ends of imagination
hooks in to memory threads
giving them a place to be
I’m picking up hints of a tapestry
It has blue in it
you are shining a lighton it for memetamorphosis feels
strangely goodmy heart is a chrysalis
just now
Tuesday is very soon
breathing is hardly
any sound at allstars will holdeverything together in lightFall 2010 23

Elsa Gidlow
Love’s Acolyte (1919)

Many have loved you with lips and fingers
And lain with you until the moon went out;
Many have bought you lover’s gifts!
And some have left their dreams on your doorstep.
But I who am youth among your lovers
Come like an acolyte to worship,
My thirsting blood restrained by reverence,
My heart a worthless prayer.
The candles of desire are lighted,
I bow my head, afraid before you,
A mendicant who craves your bounty
Ashamed of what small gifts she brings.

24 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Meg Torwl
Je t'adore (1999)

I have seen
your lips on my breast
like a worshipper
at a temple
I have felt
your tongues libations
I have known
your head fall downwith overwhelming passion
as my body rises
to meet you.

Fall 2010 25

Elsa Gidlow
To the Unknown Goddess (1918)

Come to me at the top of the World,
Oh Mine, before the years spill
Our rare love in to Time’s cup
And give our will to Time’s will.
My wide basin is full of starlight,
My moon is lighted with new fire,I have lit every sun in the firmamentWith the hurting flame of my desire.
The worms there in the valley
Die – to forget death.
But here at the top of the world
I laugh under my breath.
There is pain here, and tears,
Bitter, terrible tears;
But the joys have warm mouths, and madness
Dances downwards with the years.
Come to me at the top of the world,
O Mine. The valley is deep.
The valley is overfull of the dying
And with those who sleep.
But here wonderful winds blow
And the pines sing one song.
Come to me at the top of the world,Come soon. I have waited too long.

26 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Meg Torwl
Mountain (1998)
was itthe chilling windwhipping in my eyes
which made me weep
or was it
the beauty of
being so high up
with mountains
in all directions
or was it being therewith you to shareover came mewith emotion
was it that I could not walk
now anyof the last steep trail
to the very top
that made the tears
course down
my facebut watched you go gladly
as my body yearned
to toilup the narrow trail
where the wind swept
mountain dust in waves off
the top of the ridge
was it some freedom
I felt carefree on a rockat high altitude
as the windplayed a mortalmournful whistle
in the hollows
of my walking sticks
keeningkenkin.

Fall 2010 27

Sharon Bridgforth
and/Freedom is my namei am from swamp and thicket.
flowering in sludge
i bask in laughter and tears.
7 cycles of rain/and stars
return my memories to the sunwhere Angels sing my name.
wrapped in Prayers of them before
a thousand threads of moonlight kisses
blanket my spirit/dance.
i am born again.
this time
i am free.
and suddenly i can fly.

28 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Ching-In Chen
Love with the Chinese Lion Dancer

Then your head emerged
from the cavern of the lionhead,all ponytail and shit talk.
Sweat and swagger.
You knew your bodyand its capacity for velocity.
Every week,
I came to the corner of the den,out of your eyesight,
among the thin black shoes.
I tried to get my hands
to dance in the air
under the heavy lid of wire,
the bones of a discarded animal
scraped to metal.
The brooding eyes of the teacher
who shook her head,
kept me indoors.
We had to be better than the boys.
Their easy place grantedin the parade route,
their heavy legs marking time in the cold,arms burly from the drums.
So I flicked and flicked,
praying for strong wrists.
Watched you through the metal gate
leap from tile to tile,
over the waiting arched back of your partner,
practicing flight.

Fall 2010 29

Sharon Bridgforth
Excerpt from lovve/rituals & rage

i grew up n da woods
fak/our houz waz so fa bak
dem parts didn hab no nam
so we calln it
way-bak/dats where i grew up/yeahin way-bak, lousyanna.
my ma’ma’s people waz full-blood Koromanteen
from Kromantine on da Gold Coast,boughtova slaves/daKoromanteens
escap’dinta da hilly-woods
made a way
nexta da Arawak/who
waz-first-on-dat-land.
white folk didn neva see da Koromantine
no mo
dat scar’d em/yeah/white folk
said da Koromantine turn’d theyselves inta
bush n tree/say dats why na n den
a bush o tree
wou raise up
n kill sheself a white folk.
ma’ma always laugf bout dat say,gurl, dat go ta sh’w ya dem backra dun’t nu
nuthn
kep em scar’d/kep we safe!
na/my paw’paw’s people
waz all-bloods-mix’d/made he be geecheee.
he mak a livn readn shells
by da port
till he met my ma’ma
who stepn off da boat from da hilly-woods/lookn
fa hope.

30 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

paw’paw say ma’ma tooka hold of him eyes n nextthang he know’d he donn jump’d da broom n waz
livn in way-bak
na/paw’paw mak lik ma’ma spell’d him/i don’t
know/but i know
paw’paw be smiln
all da time
till one day paw’paw wenta town
neva come back.
he stopn a white man from tryn ta take a cul’lad
gurl-child’s-wo’mnhood by force
paw’paw beatdat white man/who tole da deputy/n da sheriffn a-whole-crowd-of-white peoples/took mypo black/red/high-brown paw n burn’d him
alive n da town square/spitn at him n calln him
out his nam.
my ma’ma saw it all
in her dreams/said
paw’paw he com’n ta her be moan’nsaid she had ta go be wid him/said
not ta worry
she’d
be
right
bak/i
thank ma’ma went in dem
woods n gavn sheself
ta death.
na/but she did come bak i
waz rais’d by Spirits/yeah!
right dere in way-bak lousyanna
dey rais’d me/ma’ma
paw’paw and dey peoples.
only thang bout it, i neva figur what me
nam bedey
all been calln me somethang deffrent
indeffrent langauages/cept
ma’ma who calln mebaby

Fall 2010 31

baby/she whoz sangn calls da Spirits down
baby/she who is Windbaby/the trees lovve herbaby daughtan paw’paw who not calln me nuthn cause all he dois moanma’ma say he still mad at da whitefolk/say anga donn tied him tongue.
na/mus be a great numba wid dem tongue tiedcause i donn hearn a whole-lota moan’n in my dey/yeah.
na/well anyway
i nam’n myself
baby may-finecause one day ma’ma’s
baby may-finelovve.
i sho be lookn
i even goes ta da port/watch dey come off daboats/i be lookn/i say
fo somebody ta LOVVE me wid all dey
heart/somebody i wouldn mind die’n fo
and spendn all-time wid.
baby/she whoz sangn calls da Spirits down
baby/she who is Windbaby/the trees lovve herbaby daughta32 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Ching-In Chen
Bag of PlasterFall 2010 33

Anne MacKay
Edna St. Vincent Millay Goes to a Gay Bar

Entering, she walked between large
boulders, unsteady on pebbles,
seaweed, green and brown.
“Is that . . .?” “Yes. Don’t talk.
She’ll see me here - look down.”
Overhead, seagulls wheel, cry:“where? -- where? – forget! – forget!”“She runs to me but chooses him.
She drinks to drown regret.”
Strong smell of salt and sea -alcohol, perfume fill the room.
“There -- she sees me with you.
She’ll drink too much, then leave.”
Clouds mist in from the sea,
weave around rocks and shore.
Distant foghorns mourn.

34 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Evening on Lesbos

Twice having seen your shingled heads adorable
Side by side, the onyx and the gold,
I know that I have had what I could not hold.
Twice have I entered the room, not knowing she was here.
Two agate eyes, two eyes of malachite,
Twice have been turned upon me, hard and bright.
Whereby I know my loss.
Oh, not restorable
Sweet incense, mounting in the windless night!

Fall 2010 35

Anne MacKay
Gertrude and Alice Seated in Their Atelier, 1923

Gertrude and Alice sit across from each other,
Edwardian floral patterns on their clothes, chairs –unexpected designs in their modernist world.
Well-made wooden furniture, objets d’art everywhere,
small statues, vases with flowers, candles, porcelains,perfectly arranged on tables and fireplace mantel.
A high room, the walls filled with framed drawings
and paintings. It’s all very neat and carefully posed.
Gertrude, solid, rests in her large comfortable chair,socks and sandals emerging under a long black skirt.
Alice, who suffers fools gladly for Gertrude’s sake,sits in a straighter chair, small feet together, relaxed
yet poised, ready to entertain guests – or photographer.
They are looking towards the camera. You can tellGertrude’s mind is on something else -- lunch?
the open box of chocolates by her side?
They like being photographed. There is a sense of ease,
the importance of place and time, and time to come.
Alice, strong presence as partner and guardian,
Gertrude, as fierce and fearless as those male adventurers
who tame the wilderness. Gertrude, promoter, discovererof the newest art, dazzling explorer of words and newforms of language. Gertrude, who writes – “I can beanything and everything and it is always always alright.”

36 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Gertrude Stein
Dear Mrs.

I take my pen in hand to congratulate
you dear Mrs. on the extremely promisinghusband you have. He promises everything
and he means it too. He did not notmean it. He means it. The darling. Thisejaculation refers to Mrs. not to Mr.
as might be erroneously supposed.
Mrs. is the fountain of all goodall beauty and all sweetness. Mrs
is a graceful fountain and sheplays over Mr. who is certain that
Mrs. is a grateful fountain whichmeans that it is grateful to
Mr. to have Mrs. play over him. Mr.
is so grateful. Dear Mrs. Lovingly yoursMr.
[2921-3]

Fall 2010 37

Tamiko Beyer
The Love Poem
Two women sleeping
together have more than their sleep to defend.
- Adrienne Rich, New York City, 1978
This strand, your body.
Your face round as the moon and like the moon
dipped with scars, adolescentboyhood memories:
ambling down crowded sidewalks chest curved
to a thin crescent, walking syncopated blue jean rhythm
to unremember the guilty refrainof your feet in your mother’s pumps.
Now, when we kissyour lipstick smears against mine.
On the wide, white bed I trace
your shoulder’s broad curve,
flick delicate bra hooks, cup your breasts—
small apples that make my own ache in memoriesof twelve-year-old growing pains—
how my chest dimpled into unknown body.
A tree against a white sky.
Hair falls across your face as
I bow to the temple of your smoothskin, as I lick the salt
from nipple, belly. Touch
my tongue to the ruffleof green silk and elastic where you spill
heavy against tender thighs.
This treacherous landscape, thischoose-your-own-adventure.
I wash upon its shores, gather
scars in my mouth. Across ourhistories we tumble—this discovery,
lovely friction. We call, we call into

38 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

each other’s bones, into each other’s singing,shimmering bones. We sing
into each other’s singing bones.
We weep, we eat
our tears, we shimmer into dawn.
Thirty years ago in this same
screeching city Adrienne watchedover her lover’s sleep, counted the dangers wovenin each strand of her hair. Wrote:in the pain of the city, turning
I am remembered by you, remember you
Meaning: woman body loving woman
body finding home, refuge, comfort.
Below us the streets shimmer awake—this city still crackling with pain,
this city turning its face to us in the newmorning light. And still
so much to defend.
Adrienne might never have imagined
us but we remember again, deliver words
bruised and shining—your body wholly
yours and I loving wholly. Home.
Refuge. Comfort.
Watch the poems crack
open, watch us step through.

Fall 2010 39

Adrienne RichThe Images

Close to your body, in thepain of the city
I turn. My hand half-sleeping reaches, finds
some part of you, touch knows you before language
names in the brain. Out in the darka howl, police sirens, emergency
our 2 a. m. familiar, ripping the sheath of sleep
registering pure force as if all transpired—
the swell of cruelty and helplessness—in one block between West End
and Riverside. In my dreams the Hudson
rules the night like a right-hand margin
drawn against the updraftof burning life, the tongueless criesof the city. I turn again, slip my arm
under the pillow turned for relief,
your breathing traces my shoulder. Two women sleeping
together have more than their sleep to defend.
And what can reconcile methat you, the woman whose handsensual and protective, brushes me in sleep
go down each morning into such a city?
I will not, cannot withhold
your body or my own from its chosen danger
but when did we ever choose
to see our bodies strungin bondage and crucifixion across the exhausted air
when did we choose
to be lynched on the queasy electric signsof midtown when did we choose
to become the masturbator’s fix
emblem of rape in Riverside Park the campgroundat Bandol the beach at Sydney?
We are trying to live

40 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

in a clearheaded tenderness—
I speak not merely of us, our lives
are “moral and ordinary”
as are the lives of numberless women—
I pretend the Hudson is a right-hand margin
drawn against fear and woman-loathing(water as purification, river as boundary)but I know my imagination lies:in the name of freedom of speech
they are lynching us no law is on our side
there are no boundaries
no-man’s-land does not exist.
I can never romanticize language again
never deny its power for disguise for mystification
but the same could be said for musicor any form createdpainted ceilings beaten gold worm-worn Pietàs
reorganizing victimization frescoes translating
violence into patterns so powerful and pure
we continually fail to ask are they true for us.
When I walk among the time-battered stones
thinking already of you
when I sat near the sea
among parched yet flowering weeds
when I drew in my notebook
the thorned purple-tongued flower, each petal
protected by its thorn-leaf
I was muteinnocent of grammar as the waves
irrhythmically washing I felt washed cleanof the guilt of words there was no word to readin the book of that earth no perjury
the tower of Babel fallen once and for all
light drank at my bodythinking of you I felt freein the cicadas’ pulse, their encircling praise.
When I saw hér face, she of the several faces
staring indrawn in judgment laughing for joy

Fall 2010 41

her serpents twisting her arms raised
her breasts gazing
when I looked into hér world
I wished to cry loose my soul
into her, to become
free of speech at last.
And so I came home a woman starving
for images
to say my hunger is so old
so fundamental, that all the lost
crumbled burnt smashed shattered defaced
overpainted concealed and falsely named
faces of every past we have searched together
in all the ages
could rise reassemble re-collect re-member
themselves as I recollected myself in that presence
as every night close to your bodyin the pain of the city, turning
I am remembered by you, remember you
even as we are dismemberedon the cinema screens, the white expensive wallsof collectors, the newsrags blowing the streets—and it would not be enough.
This is the war of the images
We are the thorn-leaf guarding the purple-tongued flower
each to each.
1976-1978

42 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Tamiko Beyerfrom bough breaks

and if by invisibility they mean they do not see us
our bows and gnashing teeth
our prom dress feather boa heels
hair glittered gray the fisting and holler
fishnets fishnets breasts breasts breasts
our voices pitched forward into reclamation
the blood in our mouths sweet slick
like our ready-to-take-you between our legs –we signify no shelter signify
the precipice from where we’ve returned
all our baskets full of fruit and shark teeth
in the end no vision villain-split
our diy manicures all silvery and chipped
our shouts so lovely so lovely all that licking

Fall 2010 43

Audre Lorde
Love Poem

Speak earth and bless me with what is richest
make sky flow honey out of my hips
rigid as mountains
spread over a valley
carved out by the mouth of rain.
And I knew when I entered her I washigh wind in her forest's hollow
fingers whispering soundhoney flowedfrom the split cup
impaled on a lance of tongues
on the tips of her breasts on her navel
and my breath
howling into her entrances
through lungs of pain.
Greedy as herring-gulls
or a childI swing out over the earth
over and overagain.

44 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Audre Lorde
PowerThe difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to killyourself
instead of your children.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his bloodas it sinks into the whitenessof the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.
The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish bloodand a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” andthere are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman and in his own defense“I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color.” andthere are tapes to prove that, too.

Fall 2010 45

Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police
forcing
has been set freeby 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
"They convinced me" meaning
they had dragged her 4’10" black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous moldor lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plugand connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody’s motherand as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in-time“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”46 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs
motherourselves
after “Power” by Audre Lorde

to insistyou are notyour motheris mere rhetorica poem:she backs a bright red tractor trailer
slams flat sideways into the stucco wall of the neighbor’s housein the center of my dream
my heart a concrete slap beats punctual in the upstairs window
wide across the cul-de-sacrage rush I stand over the truck bed
her neck limp lips split looking at me
i demand to know
why why why are you crazy
how can you how can you how can you do thismy mother my mother my mothermy mother is in there
the fire that teaches my mother tocrave love and blame it for everything
sold by Johnson & Johnson through Essence magazine
a flammable hair productlicks her ears burning whispersof how she should have more money
and that it is better to be lonely than alone
today that 53-year-old black woman
with 18 years of single mothering
lives there
in a color-coded middle-class brick prison
pretends to be satisfied

Fall 2010 47

confides“I look forward to those days when he has to work 24 hours.”
some days she threatens to kill them bothand he the firefighter
calls the police
I try to singe my fingerprints off
touching the destruction within me
but unless I learn
to usethe opposite of rhetoric
I will become too tangled in my own hairan acid rain steaming through the shower
trying to bleach my skin of respectability
claiming to know a better way
and the cigarette ads will sing me to oblivion“you’ve come a long way baby.”

48 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Toni P. Brown
from the Clementine Poems

O my darling
I wanted to write about
your taste
then I remembered the
Amaryllis
open on your windowsill
you said it was like a mouth
I disagree.

Fall 2010 49

Janet Mason
from a woman alone poems

she colors her own fields
wide open with purple
and yellow bowing
to a prism of green
swept away
in a stampedeof poppies
a woman alone iswild and red.

50 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

SJ Sindu
CocoonI am the stepping stone
the transition point
the rope that saves the drowning transman
the female-to-male transsexual
the butch too butch to be a butch no more
Testosterone throbs in your bloodrides on your cells
as they soar and dip
through your bodythrough your brain
anger and sex
like any other man
I can give you hormone shots
I can stand by your bed
before surgery
and tell you I love youwith or without breasts
I can use strange phrases likedouble bi-lateral mastectomy
metoidioplasty
urethra lengthening
phrases that morph in the mouth
and taste like metallic saline
taste buds dissecting themselves
I can make you feel like a man
until you no longer need a trophy
I am the fucking Camaro
I know to call it a penis
call them balls
cringe when you refer to your uterus
pretend you don’t have one
I can let you fall fast
fall hardhead over heels
because I’m there

Fall 2010 51

at the point when you are neither
that cusp of change
before the world turns inside out
and shows its seams
the string unravelingtying in on itself
like a surgeon’s stitches
I can be the voice that whispers sugar caneeven when I am trapped in the saccharine
drowning
invisiblecaught between the carbon bonds
poisoned by phenylalanine
during tea timespiraling, draining
like blood in a bathtub
I can tell you I see stubble on your chinwhen all I see are shadows
satisfy a sky-rocketing sex drive
Of course your hairline’s not receding
And yes, your penis is bigger than it was two hours ago
I can tell you I love your scars
but I can’t show you mine
remnants of internal bleeding
cut by your manhooda sea of salty tears
rocking and pulsing
interpretive dance of destruction
This is your story
but I am the pages you markwith the ink of transition
brandednever going backthe discarded cocoon

52 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Pat Parker
Exodus (To my husbands, lovers)

Trust me no more –Our bed is unsafe.
Hidden within folds of clotha cancerous rage –i will serve you no morein the name of wifely love
I’ll not masturbate your pridein the name of wifely loyalty
Trust me no more
Our bed is unsafe
Hidden within folds of clotha desperate love
You date to dismiss my anger
call it woman’s logic
You date to claim my body
call it wifely duty
Trust me no moreYour bed is unsafe
Rising from folds of cloth –Fall 2010 53

Carol Guess
Hesperidium

Cafés stack chairs into long-legged spiders. Night walk in the
shadow of anonymous jumpers, each bridge a postscript to the
happy ending I’ve meant to write for myself. We faced off overa couch scattered with pillows sewn from scraps, bare arms
crossed because you already owned me. That was all it took,
really—the precise arc of suspension a bridge wields over a city
as it swivels and the waterline tilts, lowering its hips, horizon
glowing for the bridge and its beacon.
How night howls into violet stars. How stars leap, too, andcars block the path to the park where the dog used to walk me.
How water dries in the tap and food runs out.
Even now I see you in the hour of orange light. Your skirt
trails on the stair--I’m never sure--cool dusk breaking tin
houses to pieces. Here’s where foghorns slice the drawbridge,
here’s where locks lift The Alaskan, here’s where trucks
rumble past, recycling green glass, grinding it to sand. Here’s
where sand slips through my fingers in darkness. Still amulticolored sharpness—

54 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Elizabeth ColenDES OEUFS

A naked woman as motif is too easy. Breasts are universal.
Life, birth, blood, and all of that. I see you standing against thewall of a French patisserie thinking, I will never see you
standing against the wall in a French patisserie again. The
plane will go down and all the croissants inside us, chocolate
and buttered and otherwise, will go down too. I want to
explain the laws of motion to you, but when you’re standing
against a wall it seems silly to imagine you rocking yourfingers inside me. It seems silly to imagine the pleasure you
will try to give me later in the hotel room. La chambre d’hotel.
We will wake up way too late to really see anything at the
Louvre but the crowded Mona Lisa and maybe Venus de Milofrom the stairs. We will put on clothes. We will have eggs forbreakfast, but they will call them something else.

Fall 2010 55

Muriel Rukeyser
What Do I Give You?

What do I give you? This memory.
I cannot give you : it rings my nerves among.
None of these songs
Are made in their images.
Seeds of all memory
Given me I give you
My own self. Voice of my days.
Blessing; the seed and pain.
Green of the praise of growth.
The sacred body of thirst.

56 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Muriel Rukeyser
The Transgress
The summer midnight under her aurora
northern and still we passed the barrier.
Two make a curse, one giving, one accepting.
It takes two to break a curse
transformed at last in each other's eyes.
I sat on the naked bed of space,
all things becoming other than what they seemin the night-waking, in the revelation
thundering on tabu after the broken
imperative, while the grotesque ancestors fadewith you breathing beside me through our dream:
bed of forbidden things finally known-art from the symbol struck, living and made.
Branch lifted green from the dead shock of stone.

Fall 2010 57

Beatrix Gates
from Dos

II. The Knife
The cut.
She used it as a verb,"when we cut...."As a girl, she told me how she survived the knife
when her abuelita challenged her, Take it!
handing her the knife,
the morning she announced she wanted to end her life,
Take it!
as the girl turned away in shame,
shame for her life and shame for admitting the pain of it
to her grandmother, her father's own
supreme protector, mother.
*Years before, a boy allowed to slice my neck.
A young girl—my answer, Yes.
Luck the cut that left a need for song,
I heard the white throated sparrow's
six notes and my own Yes, no no no... .
Tasting sound, alive in my mouth,
I turned to arrive into a different language, hers.
I wanted to pull the cut closed with a song,scar knots.
The girl in Mexico watched the machete come downon the necks of the chickens slaughtered in the kitchen,taken squawking from the henhousenext to the house on the roof where she and her mother andsister stayed,feathers drifting on steamy air
and landing on stones in the street below,

58 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

roosters crowing from the chimney and guttersof her grandmother’s boarding house.
The girl tasted the burst of sweet saliva in the mouth of
disdain,acrid silence in the hall where she ran the length of stairs
passing her father’s second floor rooms
shared with another woman. She, the person
listed as his wife in the artist's books, a mentionof two children, none of her own mother
whose hand she held, sometimes,
when the three—mother and two daughters—
walked upstairs abreast.
*
Second language, she heard Spanish first, but learned to speak
English,and before her native tongue cleared, strange numbers
appeared on the blackboard, continuing a mystery to the girlbetween languages, erased at the end of each school day
by close mother English and kitchen Spanish—grandmother supervising the count.
The girl danced, spoke in a rush of skipping words
and counted steps, cobbled stones
the letters of her mother's name, Rose,and letters in her father's name, Luis,
the same count and same broken syllables in Spanish.
To her, the running girl, it seemed that only birds in flight
could sing the same way in all syllables
as they trilled shapes dancing on air.
IV. Inside the Wind
The taste of her dries, evaporates sweet
inside the wind and stays like salt.
Sun how you carry waves on the air

Fall 2010 59

Wind the dusky voiced companion
cloudscovering and uncovering her eyes:
I hold her by letting her run through my hands.
I learn to singdeath lives here:
the deeper the love
the deeper the pain, her words.
Fire-torn husk I fell to red earth.
Fire burns everything except the bones.
Twisted sticks tap on shelves of rockpicked up by the windochre slabs cut with blue scrawling words
until veins can be seen again.
Carved grief voice of blackened sands.
Bare rock before and after,
she sought a teller
for her storied self
hoping someone else could tellwhat the wind said before tearing it from her mouth.
She grew herself on the air
and burnished talons for landing.
Gryphon bisexual: she could not fail the testof prideand power would be hersin flight.
Brow turned upward
taking in the sun:her cinnamon skin glows at dusk,
her grandmother’s
Tabascena knives and blood
under hoof prints at the edge of the desert.
Skeletal ash for miles,

60 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

the blood volcano's glistening sash.
Air, the only name for life.
V.
I didn’t really want to talk about it or tell,taking my life up again, my good feetwalking backwards
across hot deaf stones, then running until I reached a cave,
the artist’s room. The whole of it, weighing too much,
until that moment when all her unanswering (silence) lay deep
in my slowly turned back, weeping done.
There. I burned all the papers, I spoke to the wall alone. I saidit.
I threw it away to survive. Don’t make me do it again.
My friend said: some have given up.
You gave what you had you loved.
She is the I I loved.
She the stranger I could almost become
and when I floated alone as a stranger,
I found others
who in kindness asked me,
across the ground of powdery ash and shapes of dying selves
who are you?
I learned to love by being stranded
where the current and the tide, and loneliness itself,neither hers nor mother brine was my salt answering sea.
*
Wide-lit morning
red shout of evening
she who expels the colors of day
in a breath and yawning, obliterates
difference with a dry salt breeze

Fall 2010 61

Pearl pain
curled hand
she always, she nevercolorless words
twisting to resolve*
I did not know the light
I had inside
I did not know I could stop
to let it rise
Sun above, fire below, Popocatepetl—
our beginning called back in flashes—rock hardened by the hunger of the wind
black clay smoothing distanceand closeness to the same contours.
Now, easy within the city's rush of color—
black silver white stream light at the windows
encouraging.
The night sky of the country tells a different story—
the far visible and therefore the smallnessof our planet and patch of earth
also visible It is humbling to stand outsideand see the night sky with the naked eye.
She lived in a different country
with infamous winds:
blew the doors shut and carved streets bare
Direction came from outsidecommon as north south disappearance and waiting
I did not know I had the breath of firelight.
I needed light to capture the dark:

62 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

to stand quiet, full shadow cast behind,unafraid of another’s light or dark
and feel the full-throated sun, lemon yellow red,ride the sky all day and fall through the night
into further circles of cool immensity
slowly carefully
without knowing where the spreading touch of darkness
would fold to light again.
Fearsome secret, shy turning
to the sky as years returnand pass
outside earth span.
Was it the bird of death I rodemy body, ribbed kite,flying inside the far moment?
My senses came back to me one by one
even as sightlessness pored from my eyes
and became a cry seeking lament.
Reblazing breath opened a cavern.
And blood the one that kept track
all bloodthe beat of loss.

Fall 2010 63

Joan Larkin
The Fire
What I loved about you
finally I have forgotten
It was something to dowith your hairand the late afternoon
light the floor
the molten stripe in the table
Nothing had weight or number
coins apricots windows
everything burningand not forgotten
so much as fallen
like a husk shining paper
from the burnt grain

64 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Beatrix Gates
Conditions

1. If I am empty and emptierand no longer know
how to weed out hollow fury
how to walk away—cracked shell,rounded shoulder
then the shape of a bowl is what I'm seeking
space more than water
air lighter than drifting sound.
2. If I cannot be hurt, then the wound was never forgiven.
If I have learned to praise, then scars glow, old dry
shiny moon.
3. I walk the hard dirt roadslowly the flow of hillsides
reach of trees
acrossmy shadow lengthening curving
I empty as I walk.
One time, I saw a bull frog on the dirt
big as a full-spread palm,brown skin peeled from one muscled thighwhole body in a pose of high alertorgan spit out the back, empty of life.

Fall 2010 65

Carolyn Gage
For Rachel Crites
On January 20, Rachel Crites, 18, and Rachel Smith, 16, werereported missing by their parents. Crites had left this note in her
diary: “Wherever I end up laying, whether buried or cremated, I
want to stay with my true love, buried next to her. This is my
choice. I’m sorry.” On February 2, the bodies of the two girls
were discovered in the front seat of the missing car, in a remotewooded area of Virginia. They had committed suicide by carbon
monoxide poisoning.

And she said,“Wherever I end up laying . . .
I want to stay with my true love . . .”“With my true love . . .
Next to her.”
She said:“This is my choice.”
She said.
“This is my choice.”“I’m sorry.”
And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for every sorry time you had to hear “gay” like it was
something bad.
I’m sorry for every sorry time they called you dyke and didn’tmean that you were fierce, and strong, and true toloving women.
I’m sorry for the sorry Catholic church that called you asinner.

66 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

I’m sorry for all the sorry teachers who never taught you how
natural, how normal it is for women to love women andfor girls to love girls, and that many of the mostbrilliant, most daring, most courageous women in
history were lesbians.
I’m sorry.
And if it was up to me,
I would bury you,
Bury you with your true love,
And her with you.
And I’m sorry for the suffocation
That had nothing to do with CO2.
And I’m sorry for the long, slow freezing
That had nothing to do with temperature.
And I’m sorry they took so long,
Took too long,
To locate you.
Because they’ll never find you now.
And if it was up to me,
I would bury you,
Bury you with your true love,
And her with you.
And on the stone, I’d carveYour last words
In deep granite gashes,
Too deep to wear away,
Those sorry words
You leftTo a sorry world—
Rachel, I would carve,“I’m sorry.”Fall 2010 67

Charlotte Mew
Absence

Sometimes I know the way
You walk, up over the bay;
It is a wind from that far sea
That blows the fragrance of your hair to me.
Or in this garden
when the breeze
Touches my trees
To stir their dreaming shadows on the grass
I see you pass.
In sheltered beds, the heart of every rose
Serenely sleeps to-night. As shut as thoseYour guarded heart; as safe as they from the beat, beat
Of hooves that tread dropped roses in the street.
Turn never again
On these eyes blind with a wild rainYour eyes; they were stars to me—
There are things stars may not see.
But call, call, and though Christ stands
Still with scarred hands
Over my mouth, I must answer. So
I will come—He shall let me go!

Note from Carolyn Gage: In “Absence,” Mew expresses her defiance ofa Christianity that would keep her away from her love… even suggestingthat this lesbian love has the power to convert Christ himself. Traditionallyhomophobic religious traditions, such as Catholicism or fundamentalist
Christianity, contribute to the pressures that drive young lesbians to taketheir lives.

68 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Charlotte Mew
The Changeling
Toll no bell for me, dear Father dear Mother,
Waste no sighs;
There are my sisters, there is my little brother
Who plays in the place called Paradise,Your children all, your children for ever;But I, so wild,Your disgrace, with the queer brown face, was never,
Never, I know, but half your child!
In the garden at play, all day, last summer,
Far and away I heard
The sweet “tweet-tweet” of a strange new-comer,
The dearest, clearest call of a bird.
It lived down there in the deep green hollow,
My own old home, and the fairies say
The word of a bird is a thing to follow,
So I was away a night and a day.
One evening, too, by the nursery fire,
We snuggled close and sat round so still,
When suddenly as the wind blew higher,
Something scratched on the window-sill,
A pinched brown face peered in—I shivered;
No one listened or seemed to see;
The arms of it waved and the wings of it quivered,
Whoo—I knew it had come for me!
Some are as bad as bad can be!
All night long they danced in the rain,
Round and round in a dripping chain,
Threw their caps at the window-pane,
Tried to make me scream and shout
And fling the bedclothes all about:
I meant to stay in bed that night,
And if only you had left a light
They would never have got me out!

Fall 2010 69

Sometimes I wouldn’t speak, you see,Or answer when you spoke to me,
Because in the long, still dusks of Spring
You can hear the whole world whispering;
The shy green grasses making love,
The feathers grow on the dear grey dove,
The tiny heart of the redstart beat,
The patter of the squirrel’s feet,
The pebbles pushing in the silver streams,
The rushes talking in their dreams,
The swish-swish of the bat’s black wings,
The wild-wood bluebell’s sweet ting-tings,
Humming and hammering at your ear,
Everything there is to hearIn the heart of hidden things.
But not in the midst of the nursery riot,
That’s why I wanted to be quiet,
Couldn’t do my sums, or sing,Or settle down to anything.
And when, for that, I was sent upstairs
I did kneel down to say my prayers;
But the King who sits on your high church steeple
Has nothing to do with us fairy people!
‘Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother,
Learned all my lessons and liked to play,
And dearly I loved the little pale brother
Whom some other bird must have called away.
Why did they bring me here to make me
Not quite bad and not quite good,
Why, unless They’re wicked, do They want, in spite,
to take me
Back to Their wet, wild wood?
Now, in everything I shall see the windows shining,
The gold lamp’s glow, and the fire’s red gleam,
While the best of us are twining twigs and the rest of us
are whining
In the hollow by the stream.
Black and chill are Their nights on the wold;
And They live so long and They feel no pain:

70 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

I shall grow up, but never grow old,
I shall always, always be very cold,
I shall never come back again!

Note from Carolyn Gage: I chose “The Changeling,” because it
expresses a child’s experience of being different from the rest of thefamily—explaining this difference in terms of having been kidnapped andtransformed by fairies. This time, Mew’s defiance of Christianity strikes amore defiantly pagan note: “But the King who sits on your high church
steeple/ Has nothing to do with us fairy people!” Sadly, it also articulates a
confused sense of “being not quite bad and not quite good.”Fall 2010 71

Chocolate Waters
Disturbance
The mountain dark treacherous
wild with loneliness the nighthiding in its own shadow
Accented by a kerosene lamp
The smell of smoke from a wood-burning stovea rifle cocked & loaded in the corner.
Tonight three burly men outside my cabin door
Two Chicanos unkempt but smiling
The third man fat short whitea mean wide faceas greasy as a frying pan.
They stand so easy in my space
thinking nothing of it
I play my guitar to all the trees
The wide one grins
his teeth as dirty as
any that I've read about or seen.
"Goodbye Guy," he says
Curls his lip around the second word
his way to tell me that he knows
I am a dyke
His male ego erect His IQ of minus 20
His primitive hate the hate of every man
for a woman
who sins against his entire sex
by omission.
My stomach churns at his departure
Remembering a sawed-off Southern truck driverwith a crewcut
and short mean teeth
Six years ago he tried to rape me
I was 22
struggling for my lifecaught between the shelter of the trees

72 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

and his semi on the other side
I had taken the half-mile ride
for which I had to pay
inside his arms
His cock unzippered hardagainst my unsuspecting jeans.
"I have to be back by four."I was logical.
He was amused.
He tried to smear his face across my mouth.
I tried to remember how to kill him.
The truth is that he let me go.
His goodwill. His enjoyment.
I ran away thanking him.
My voice high-pitched obsequious
dramatizing the story later
to hide my powerlessness.
Thank ya Thank ya massah
Let this poor defenseless creature go
She is only a woman.
I am only awoman
remembering that terrified woman's criesthat pulling at survivalthat groveling on the ground
The face of his unquestioned power thenHis whim to let me go or rape and kill me.
Tonight my rifle makes no sound
But if you come inside that door
Fat Greasy Frying Pan man
Sawed-off Southern Trucker or
Any man who thinks he canTrample on my space again
I will not hesitate to throw this trigger backAnd send your head across the peaceful trees
Then cry only for your violence
That sits aching in my fingers
On the trigger of this gun.

Fall 2010 73

Chocolate Waters
scratch scratch (a performance poem)in the woods
w/my girlfriend cindy
w/my girlfriend cindy black
cindy black and i were 10yrs. oldspelling curse words in the woods
the luscious darkened hairy woods
alone we were all alone
w/the lovely teenage boys
who were 17 maybe 18 maybe 13
we were cussing/spelling
funning w/the cussing spelling words
4 of us alone w/the words
in the woodsin the grabbing woods
the hairy tentacled grabbing woods
suddenly
my father
my red and drunken father
you didn’t comehomeyour mother said you didn’t come homewhat were you doing in these woods
these probing hairy woods alone
with your girlfriend cindy blackand these boys
these teenage boys
don’t you know they wanted to stick theirorgans into yours
don’t you know
i didn’t know
i didn’t know that/scratchscratchscratch ‘til you bleed
scratch this itch of decades longone day i pushed

74 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

my cunt
into the handleof the paper cutter/found relief
oh shit those horrible clichés
all she needs is a good fuck
give this dyke a good long fat fucki climbed all over the handleof that paper cutter
fuck mecut into me
fuck the shit out of me
push it into me hardplunge it into me harder
stiffer scratch me
relieve this fucking scratching
this fucking scratching itch
this insufferable itching scratch
fuck the itch out of me
i was spelling curse words
w/my gf cindy blackand the luscious teenage boys
all alone
she came backhome w/me
and my father
we went home
we all went home
we all went
back
home

Fall 2010 75

Sandra H. Tarlin
The Good Times Are Coming
You presented roses to Emperor Haile Selassie when you were five years old.
Now, with pomp you direct your niece's funeral, nodding
your head or lifting your arm. The family men, Black and Latino,
heads covered by white kippahs, dig heels into the grass and pull tightthe straps around the coffin, lowering Gladys' pine casket into the grave.
As I push my way to the front to see better, Queen Esther, head wrappedin purple and so old, you once told me, she was old when you were young,chuckles behind me, laughing at my rudeness or at how new for me
it is to lose a friend so young. The men fill the grave and Zayit,
Gladys’ daughter, asks me, one hand covering her mouth, "Don't I get to shovel?"
The women gather at your mother's grave. You translate the bronze plaque,"The Good Times Are Coming," and as I bend to place a stone on the grave,a subway token falls out of my pocket and rolls across the Hebrew letters.
You say, "It will take more than a dollar twenty five for you to get there."
Queen Esther takes my hand and says of your mother, "She was a honeydew."
We feast on rum punch and fish cakes, and pass around photos of Gladys.
As a child in Puerto Rico, Gladys watched her grandmother light Sabbath Candles
in the closet. A young black rabbi covers his face and sobs, "First the husband,
now the wife: never mention of AIDS." The rabbi, thin from his vegan diet,once worked on Wall Street. He exclaims, "How fierce the holy letters, howlonely."When we sit shiva in Zayit's Crown Heights apartment, you are tall, Eemah,
inside the cramped living room. Though your hands have swollen from the heat,
your arms are covered with gold bracelets. You call me "the poetess"and order me to counterpoint your Hebrew with the psalms in English.
Nodding to Zayit, you say, "Explain to her what a psalm is, what inspires apoem."

76 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Adrienne Rich
When we are shaken out
For J.J.
when we are shaken out to the last vestige
when history is done with us
when our late grains glitter
salt swept into shadow
indignant and importunate strife-fractured crystals
will it matter if our tenderness (our solidarity)
abides in residue
long as there’s tenderness and solidarity
could the tempos and attunements of my voicein a poem of yours or yours and minein telephone high hilarity
cresting above some stupefied inanity
be more than personal(and—as you once said—what’s wrong with that?)

Fall 2010 77

Merry Gangemi
Invitation

Light burst throughlike water pouring,sounded like water spilling
into the room.
This is how it would be remembered
an invitation—held open—a mother-of-pearl-lined
maw of an impossible seashell.
She closed her eyes so ears could open
so mouth could taste what could not be seen
even if seeing was sight tasted.
She could melt her own bones:
frail fullness disappearing,deliciousness offered—wanting to belight colliding
beneath fingernails andtoenails
wanting
to breathe
one last finite breath—and know that breath
beforeit was gone
like a dream.
Without silence thought escapes memory;
coy and bereft
scantily cladfaint perseveration
begging for more
without fishing
without baiting the hook
without filing the pointsound scraping skinshaping whispers
the way whispers slidefrom woman to woman.

78 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

She became silver swallowed
ocean teeming—
contrapuntal breathing
ragged, measured forgiveness.
forgotten whispers
thoughts and vibrations
slipping into
whispers
like two
whispers kissing.
Space blurred where curves
drew breath
pushing her—moving her— balanced
and buoyant
exhaled—as if ocean had arrived.
She was consumed
plowed throughroundedagain and again
body flamed and perfectly calibrated
textured velvet—
effervescent azure air.
Yes, she thought
this room is not empty
nothing is empty
everything vibrates and rolls
like ships—cleaving through waves
seconds—from everything.
She heard density spinninglilting lullaby tones
soundslayered—coming apart—time—bursting time—again and again.

folding—

The colors of sound are carefully arranged
innumerable

Fall 2010 79

soundsof air and flesh meetingsound of evening closing its eyes
twisted sheets
discarded pillows—sounds of weeping and wandering.
Listen: She remembered thatstretch of beach near the inlet
and the way the boats
carved through waves.
Sunlight sneaking through pilothouse windows
splaying currents of sun on weathered faces
women watching for signs
loading nets
their catch silver-spun—
exploding—in rough raw hands—
Muscles taut enoughto hold dreams aloft
Mouths greedy enoughto toss back fire
Greedy womeninside each othertaunting women
who fish in silence
throwing what’s left
over the side—setting
course again—
and again—through our own obscured history ofdesire transcribed—
from cock to cuntrelentlessly—
joyous.

Remember how many women you told
you loved them
you really loved them
until you didn’t anymore
How they didn’t know
until you just didn’t anymore.

80 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

And you have those boxes in the basement
stuffed with newspaper-wrapped mementoes
of being with you,of knowing your body.
But did they ever know your body?
The way you liked it
the way they thought you liked it
how and why you never told them.
how you swam away
ignorant and wild.
Silence—a belief in yourself
nothing saying nothing
saying something to the mirror
grasping only—
what the liemeans—
even if you refuse
to hearthe mirror cracking
that momentwith something morethan words canbear—
within words without anythingin particularmissing.
Words with flesh and bone in themheat and lip and tongue in themcheek and lashin them
dream and nightmare in themwords lost in slashes on paper
gouges in the desktop
Curves and colors in themBooks with that smellin them
Heated wind and grassin them—
desperate
for more than toesin summer sand—sand more than the driftwood scattered across it
the sharpness of small stones on asphalt

Fall 2010 81

the limping

thinking

wanting

No more newspapers splattered with them
No more wrapped mementoes in them
No more echoes
No more boxes in cellars
No more fishing
No more hooks
No moreNo more.

82 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Marilyn Hacker
Sonnet 21 from Love, Death, and the Changing of the
Seasons
First, I want to make you come in my hand
while I watch you and kiss you, and if you cry,I'll drink your tears while, with my whole hand, I
hold your drenched loveliness contracting. And
after a breath, I want to make you full
again, and weft. I want to make you comein my mouth like a storm. No tears now. The sumof your parts is my whole most beautiful
chart of the constellations—your left breast
in my mouth again. You know you'll have to be
your age. As I lie beside you, cover melike a gold cloud, hands everywhere, at lastinside me where I trust you, then your tongue
where I need you. I want you to make me come.

Fall 2010 83

Judith Barrington
THE DYKE WITH NO NAME DOESN’T REALLY
THINK ABOUT SEX

It’s the seventies and she does it a lot, but hardly everthinks about it. She does try but she can’t concentrate:
the questions are too big, words looming and spinninglike dark planets beyond the Milky Way—
Commitment;
Faithfulness;
Love.
Each one rolls through space while the refrigerator
hums its same old note and shudders in ecstasy
or disgust. She can’t tell which.
It’s free love and even the straight girls want to do itwith a woman. Late at night, they knock on her door
rapping out the rhythm of forbidden words,
flirting around the edge of strict taboos:
Monogamy;
Possession;
Jealousy:
each one unthinkable but ever-present, its dead weightlying across the books on her home-made bookshelf
as she slips into something called freedom.

84 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Judith Barrington
FROM THE WILD
London or New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, 1974

Arm in arm, five abreast, boots synchronized
in a slow march, the broad beams or sleek keelsof our behinds sway in blue denim as we pause
one second before each step into the shade castby the banner that snaps and sways overhead—canvas stretching taut then collapsing into itself
the red-painted slogan jumbled and mumblingtill the breeze balloons it out again.
Women in navy suits lean from tenth floor offices.
Some mutter and shrug, others call out, their shouts
drowned by drums and chants—two, four, six, eight,
megaphones—what do we want?, police sirens,
shrill greetings as sidewalk-runners lap
the unwieldy caterpillar with its million legs,
its body hunching and thrusting inch by inch
towards the center of an imagined world.
Any time now, any day now, a flock of pigeons
will be released and lift off squawking
as we, too, rise from solid ground and advancelike gorgeous horses, our great hoofs stamping,
slender legs dancing, splayed nostrils broadcasting
frothy, grass-stained memories of the wild.
What do we want? The new world. When do we want it?
Now. Oh surely, right now.

Fall 2010 85

Joan Larkin
SUMMONSAre you asleep
Are you mute
Are you empty now
Are you alone
Ewe-mothershrike-motherwhere did you go
frost on a stone
Soft arms and harsh mouth,
you could say I’ve kept thembut fold a sheet my own way.
I’d like to show you.
I’m six, feverish, you’re reading to me:
white alps, your shimmering alto.
Were you awake
when your last string snapped?
I’m yeast and air in a crust
quickly swallowed.
Waking in twisted sheets, I know
how the green-smocked aide hoists you.
When time is done with me,
may there be mercy.
Ewe-mothershrike-motherwhere do you go
frost on a stone
Are you asleep
Are you mute
Are you empty now
Are you alone

86 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Judy Grahn
Slowly: a plainsong from an older woman to ayounger woman

am I not olden olden olden
it is unwanted.
wanting, wanting
am I not broken
stolen common
am I not crinkled cranky poison
am I not glinty-eyed and frozen
am I not aged
shaky glazing
am I not hazyguarded craven
am I not only
stingy little
am I not simple
brittle spitting
was I not over
over ridden?
it is a long story
will you be proud to be my version?
it is unwritten.
writing, writing
am I not ancient
raging patientam I not able
charming stable

Fall 2010 87

was I not building
forming braving
was I not ruling
guiding naming
was I not brazen
crazy choseneven the stones would do my bidding?
it is a long story
am I not proud to be your version?
it is unspoken.
speaking, speaking
am I not elder
berrybrandyare you not wine before you find me
in your own beaker?

88 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Amy Lowell and Maureen Seaton
The Amy Poems
Taking us by and large, we’re a queer lot. –“The Sisters,” Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell
Still Life Moonlight Striking Upon a Chess-Board
I am so aching to write
That I could make a song out of a chess-board
And rhyme the intrigues of knights and bishops
And the hollow fate of a checkmated king.
I might have been a queen, but I lack the proper century;
I might have been a poet, but where is the adventure to
explode me into flame.
Cousin Moon, our kinship is curiously demonstrated,
For I, too, am a bright, cold corpse
Perpetually circling above a living world.

Maureen Seaton
Still Life Malcolm Biting Upon My Left Ankle
I am so aching to write
That I could pull a mitre from the space-time continuum
And stick it, cockeyed, on the head of my jealous cat
And make him alive again and Pope.
He might have been a king, but he lacked cupidity;
He might have been a purebred, but where is the funin brushing and posing.
Malcolm, our affinity is rare and canonical,
For I, too, am all ouch and deconstruction
Perpetually biting you back, you green-eyed god.

Fall 2010 89

Amy Lowell
Carrefour

O You,
Who came upon me once
Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing,
Why did you not strangle me before speaking
Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words
And then leave me to the mercy
Of the forest bees.

Maureen Seaton
ChicagoHey you,
Who fucked me once
Pinioned in the back of your rented SUV,
Why didn’t you just go ahead and kill me
Rather than play Dave Matthews over and over, thanks a lot,
And then drop me off in Wrigleyville
Like a losing team.

90 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Queer Study (in Red)
A cento of Amy Lowell lines and fragments composed byMaureen Seaton

When I am with you, my heart is a frozen pond gleaming withagitated torches.
When you come, it brims red and trembling with blood,
heart’s blood for your drinking.
When I think of you, Beloved.
When I go away from you the world beats dead like aslackened drum.
When I think of you, it is your hands,
A luster of crimson.
But you—you come only as a harebell comes; one day there isnothing, and the next your steepled bells are all.
When you came you were like red wine and honey.
For I come at the times which suit me, morning or evening,and I am cold when I come down the long alleys to you.
A thousand misconceptions may prevent our souls fromcoming near enough to blend.
You would quiver like a shot-up spray of water.
I too should tremble, watching.

Fall 2010 91

Lines are from the following Lowell poems:
1. Opal2. Absence
3. Mise en Scene
4 The Taxi
5. A Sprig of Rosemary
6. The Captured Goddess
7. Footing Up a Total
8. A Decade
9. Paradox
10. Mirage
11. The Artist
12. The Artist

92 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Queer Study (in Blue)A cento of Maureen Seaton fragments composed by Amy
Lowell—as imagined by Maureen Seaton(After Lowell’s “Thompson’s Lunch Room—Grand Central
Station,” “Study in Whites”)

She slips her finger in her mouth and walks me backward.
Her sweet clit and her blue jeans—
Orchids
Out of nowhere.
Blue then green then blue
Opals and quicksilver,
Reflection in cologne,
Dimples of Astroglide,
Lights pointing blue and cool,Blue as jelly,
Blue-dress eyes.
The heart thrums between pubis and meridian—
Belly belly belly.
Oh transcendent, this aqua blue,
Divine fishes through blue.
She’s gorgeous in her bones and blue.
The blue the blue the blue the blue the blue.

Fall 2010 93

Lines are from the following Seaton poems:
1. Ohio
2. Ohio
3. Passing into Baltimore
4. The Nomenclature of Wind
5. The Myth of the Pileated Woodpecker
6. Secrets of Water
7. Romancing Debussy
8. The Saying
9. Jesus and Puberty
10. When I Was White
11. Endometriosis
12. The Saying
13. The Church of Scrabble
14. Woman Circling Lake
15. Secrets of Water
16. Queen of Jersey
17. Interview with Bonnie Parker

94 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Fall 2010 95

Contributor Biographies
Judith Barrington has published three collections of poetry, mostrecently Horses and the Human Soul (Story Line Press, 2004), finalist for
the Oregon Book Award and selected by Oregon State Library for "150
Books for the Sesquicentennial." Previous poetry titles include History andGeography and Trying to be an Honest Woman. Recent work includes
two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands(winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). Her Lifesaving: A Memoir
won the 2000 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha
Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Other awards include The
Dulwich Festival International Poetry Prize and, with her partner, Ruth
Gundle, The Stuart Holbrook Award from Literary Arts, Inc. “inrecognition of significant contributions that have enriched Oregon’s
literary community.” She is a faculty member of the University of Alaska’s
MFA Program and lives in Oregon. Moreat http://www.judithbarrington.com.
Tamiko Beyer is the author of bough breaks (Meritage Press,
forthcoming). Her poems have appeared in Sonora Review, OCHO,
Copper Nickel Review and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of Drunken
Boat and leads writing workshops through the NY Writers Coalition. She isa founding member of the queer, multi-racial writing collective Agent 409,
and is a Kundiman fellow. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner.
Adrienne Bradley was born and grew up in New Zealand. She has lived
in Australia, the UK, and for the past 40 years in Canada. She trained as ateacher at Auckland Teacher’s College, and also received an Advanced
Diploma in Fine Arts, from the University of London Goldsmiths College.
She has been a teacher, education consultant, mother of two sons,ceramicist, clam farmer, cabin builder, log salvager, ski lodge manager,
and traveler of the world. Adrienne’s poetry has appeared in Posted Love.
She appeared in the documentary Act Your Age!? Part of her life story has
been recorded on video for Moving Images of LGBTQI Seniors, a project of
Qmunity. Her art work, survival and recovery from a plane crash, willfeature in a film in development 9 lives: 6 months, about disability, art,
poverty, dreams, craziness and wonder, in the lives of four women.
A Writer/working in the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic, New Dramatists
member Sharon Bridgforth, is a two time Alpert Award Nominee in theArts in Theatre and is recipient of the 2008 Alpert/Hedgebrook Residency
Prize. Fall 2009 Artist In-Residence in Performance Studies at
Northwestern University, Bridgforth is listed in the Campus Pride 2009
“HOT LIST” — Top 25 Favorite LGBT Artists, Speakers, Lecturers, Music
Acts, Comedians, Activists & Much More. Her work has received support
from the National Endowment For The Arts Commissioning Program; The
National Endowment For The Arts/Theatre Communications Group
Playwright in Residence Program; National Performance Network
Commissioning Fund; the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media; and96 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund Award. Bridgforthis the author of the Lambda Literary Award winning, the bull-jean stories
and love conjure/blues, a performance/novel. Both books are published by
RedBone Press. She is an affiliate of The Austin Project, sponsored by The
John L. Warfield Center For African and African American Studies,
University of Texas at Austin (CAAAS). Bridgforth’s Finding Voice
Facilitation Manuel will be published in, Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic:
Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project, edited by Dr. Omi Osun
Joni L. Jones, Director, CAAAS, Associate Professor, Department ofTheater and Dance U.T. Austin; Dr. Lisa L. Moore, Associate Professor,
English and Women’s and Gender Studies, U.T. Austin; and Bridgforth(Summer, 2010 by University of Texas Press). For more go to:
sharonbridgforth.com.
Toni Brown (November 11 1952 - April 19, 2008) – Toni’s poems andstories have been published in journals and anthologies including: Night
Bites: Vampire Stories by Women; Night Shade: Gothic Tales by Women,
Pillow Talk II, and most recently Fireweed, American Poetry Review,Philadelphia Poets and Prairie Schooner. She was an editor for the
Painted Bride Quarterly journal and recipient of a Leeway Foundation
Emerging Writers Poetry Grant. Toni Brown was also a frequent
contributor to Sinister Wisdom through the years of her life.
The Clementine poem is previously unpublished (and was transcribedfrom an audio clip that can be found on www.amusejanetmason.com ) An
essay about Toni Brown by Janet Mason [“Portrait of a Friendship: Toni P.
Brown”] was published in Sinister Wisdom 76 “The Open Issue.”
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red
Hen Press). Daughter of Chinese immigrants, Chen is a VONA, Lambda,
Kundiman and Macondo Fellow. She has worked in the Asian American
communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston, and her
poem-film, We Will Not Be Moved!: A Story of Oakland Chinatown, wasscreened as part of the 2004 National Queer Arts Festival. Her work has
been recently published in Cha, Chroma, OCHO, Iron Horse Literary
Review, Rio Grande Review, BorderSenses, Water~Stone Review andelsewhere. Chen is the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home:
Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, forthcomingfrom South End Press. You can find her online at www.chinginchen.com
Elizabeth J. Colen’s work has recently appeared in The Normal School,
Exquisite Corpse, RHINO, and other venues. Her first book of poetry,
Money for Sunsets was released by Steel Toe Books in 2010. Find out more
at: elizabethjcolen.blogspot.com
Sharon Deevey, from Westerville, Ohio, has been a lesbian activist since
coming out in 1970. She retired from her varied careers in elementary
school teaching, nursing, and librarianship in 2006. She currently writes
and dances at a local senior center, and keeps in close touch with a lifetimeof lovers and friends.

Fall 2010 97

Carolyn Gage is a lesbian-feminist playwright, performer, director, andactivist. The author of seven books on lesbian theatre and fifty-five plays,
musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles
for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories havebeen distorted or erased from history. Her collection of plays The Second
Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays won the 2008 Lambda LiteraryAward in Drama, the top LGBT book award in the US. Other books include
Nine Short Plays, The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales, Like There’s
No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy, Sermons for
a Lesbian Tent Revival, Supplemental Sermons for a Lesbian Tent
Revival, Black Eye and Other Short Plays, The Triple Goddess: Three
Plays, Three Comedies, Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors, andTake Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play. Her complete
catalog is online at www.carolyngage.com.
A graduate of NYU, Merry Gangemi holds an MA in comparative
literature from SFSU and is currently pursuing a dual-genre MFA at
Vermont College of Fine Arts. Merry produces and hosts Woman-StirredRadio, a queer cultural journal; which broadcasts live on Goddard
College's WGDR Plainfield. Merry lives in Woodbury, Vermont with herpartner Elizabeth Hansen.
In 2011, Beatrix Gates' Nada que ocultar/ Nothing To Hide, translatedby Yolanda Moreto, will be published by Spain's puerta del mar. Gates'
collections include Ten Minutes and In the Open, a Lambda Poetry Award
finalist. Gates, with Electa Arenal, translated Spanish poet Jesus Aguado's
The Poems of Vikram Babu (HOST), and they received a Witter Bynner
Translation award to translate Aguado's lo que dices de mi/what you say
about me, portions of which appeared in Sirena: Poesia, arte and cultura
and Tarpaulin Sky. As librettist for “The Singing Bridge,” Gates &composer Anna Dembska received NEA support for the opera's 2005
premiere at Maine's Stonington Opera House. Gates' poems haveappeared in The Dirty Goat, The Kenyon Review, The Puckerbrush
Review and Ploughshares, and an interview on her poetry and translations
will be out in quay. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies,
including, recently, The Tulip Anthology (Hachette); The World in Us:
Lesbian & Gay Poetry of the Next Wave and Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our
Time (St. Martin's). She edited The Wild Good: Lesbian Writings andPhotographs on Love (Anchor) and founded Granite Press (1975-1987)
where she designed and printed limited editions of poetry and trade
paperbacks, including Grace Paley's first book of poems, Leaning
Forward,1985; Joan Larkin's A Long Sound, 1986; and the bilingual
anthology, IXOK AMAR.GO: Central American Women Poets for
Peace,1987. Gates has taught writing and worked as an editor for many
years and is a member of the Goddard MFA faculty.
To quote Phyllis Matyi, Elsa Gidlow’s friend in a 1986 Press Release: ‘Born
in Yorkshire, England in 1898, six-year-old Elsa Gidlow immigrated with

98 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

her family of nine to the French Canadian village of Tetreauville. She wasmainly self-educated, being allowed what she called, "the untutored space
to be”. Gidlow left Montreal for New York in 1920, where she became
poetry editor for Frank Harris' progressive, much censored Pearson's
Magazine. Poet-philosopher Elsa Gidlow died peacefully in her mountainhome retreat, "Druid Heights," near Muir Woods, Mill Valley, California
on June 8, 1986’. Many of the poems she wrote before 1923 were publishedthat year in her book, On a Grey Thread, Will Ransom. Her other work
includes: Sapphic Songs: Seventeen to Seventy, 1976, Diana Press;
Makings for Meditation : A Collection of Parapoems Reverent andIrreverent, 1973, Booklegger Press; and Elsa I Come With My Songs theAutobiography of Elsa Gidlow,1985, Booklegger Press. Her work appearedin many journals and anthologies. She had many lovers, as is evident in her
poetry. Including when she was a young woman with the older Tommy,
Violet Henry-Anderson, whom she met in New York in 1945, and lived
with for thirteen years until Tommy’s death. In her seventies Elsa lived
with Gretchen Muller who was then in her twenties.
Judy Grahn is an internationally known poet, writer, and social theorist.
Her work underpins several movements, including Gay, Lesbian, andQueer; Feminist/Woman-Centered; and Women’s Spirituality, but it has
spread far beyond any of these. She currently serves as Associate Core
Faculty for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto,
California, in their Women's Spirituality Master's Program. She is former
director of Women’s Spirituality MA and Creative Inquiry MFA programs
at New College of California, from which she resigned in July of 2007. Her
most recent book of poetry is love belongs to those who do the feeling (RedHen, 2009) and her collected prose The Judy Grahn Reader (Aunt Lute,2009) was published recently.
Carol Guess is the author of two novels, Seeing Dell and Switch; amemoir, Gaslight; and two poetry collections, Femme's Dictionary andTinderbox Lawn. She teaches Creative Writing and Queer Studies at
Western Washington University. Her email address:
carolannguess@gmail.com.
Jewelle Gomez, from San Francisco, CA, is an author and activist who
has published seven books of poetry and fiction, including the double
Lambda Literary Award-winning Gilda Stories. She teaches creative
writing and popular culture around the United States. Her novel Televised
is forthcoming, and she is currently at work on a play about James
Baldwin.
Marilyn Hacker is a poet, critic, and reviewer. Her books of poetry
include Names (2009), Going Back to the River (1990), Love, Death, andthe Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Presentation Piece (1974), which
won the National Book Award. In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for
Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne,
which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from theFall 2010 99

National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for
Poetry.
Susan Hawthorne is an Australian poet who has studied Ancient Greek
and Sanskrit. Her poetry is influenced by explorations of language and thehistories hidden in mythology. She has published five collections of poetry,a novel and several non-fiction books. Her poetry is available in North
America and includes Bird (1999), The Butterfly Effect (2005) and Earth’s
Breath (2009). She is currently working on a collection Cow from whichthese poems are drawn. Her poems have been published in Best AustralianPoems anthologies in 2006, 2008 and 2009. In 2009, she was an Asialink
Literature Resident in Chennai with support from the Australia Counciland Arts Queensland. She is also an aerialist, publisher and Adjunct
Professor in the Writing Program at James Cook University, Townsville.
Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six books of poetry: Building Some
Changes (Beyond Baroque Foundation); A Packet Beating Like a Heart(Books Of A Feather Press); Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press/re-released
by Red Hen Press); Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books), nominatedfor the Lambda Book Award and released as a spoken word recording by
New Alliance Records; and her collections from Red Hen Press, Passing
and most recently, The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho.
Joan Larkin, born in Boston in 1939, attended Swarthmore and the
University of Arizona. She has lived in Brooklyn, mostly, since 1969, andshe taught writing at Brooklyn College for 30 years. In her fourth decadeof teaching, she has served on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence and Goddard
Colleges, and is a member of the core faculty at New England College. She
founded Out & Out Books, a women's independent publishing company,
active from 1975-1981, publishing early books by Marilyn Hacker and Irena
Klepfisz. Larkin co-edited Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry with Elly
Bulkin; and Gay & Lesbian Poetry In Our Time (winner of a Lambda
Literary Award) with Carl Morse. Joan Larkin has published Housework(Out and Out Books); A Long Sound (Granite Press); Cold River (Painted
Leaf Books) and My Body, New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose). She
is the author of a prize-winning play, The Living, and co-translator with
Jaime Manrique of Sor Juana's Love Poems. She has received a National
Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and lives and writes
in New York City.
Audre Lorde, born in 1924 in Harlem to West Indian parents from
Grenada, is the icon of black lesbian teaching, literary production, andpolitical analyses of difference in the 20th century both in the United States
and around the world. Famous for her poetry collections, including The
Black Unicorn (which includes the poem “Power”), her biomythography
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and her critical essays in Sister
Outsider. Sister Outsider includes the essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women
Hatred and Anger” which includes the proposition “We can learn tomother ourselves.” The form of the poem “Power” and the content of the

100 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

essay “Eye to Eye” inform the poem “motherourselves” by Alexis Pauline
Gumbs.
Amy Lowell (1874-1925) produced six volumes of poetry, two ofcriticism, a two-volume biography of John Keats, and numerous articles
and reviews during her short lifetime. Her books topped best-seller lists,
sold out in advance, and went into quick second and third printings. Oneof three volumes of poetry published posthumously (What’s O’Clock) won
the 1926 Pulitzer Prize. She was a presence and force, a tireless promoterof the art, and a principal of modern poetry who went head to head with
Ezra Pound and was called a “modern of the moderns” at her memorial
tribute. She wrote and published poems to her lover(s) that are so very out.
She has been dropped from a certain “canon,”—who knows why?—yet she
keeps popping up. Here she is again—enjoy!
Anne MacKay is a writer and poet living on Long Island’s North Fork.
She is the author of Wolf Girls at Vassar: Lesbian and Gay Experiences
1930-1990, and several volumes of poetry, including Field Notes of a
Lesbian Naturalist, Sailing the Edge and Gifts. A theater teacher, shecreated and directed three lesbian musical revues, including Taking
Liberties at Symphony Space in New York City, a fundraiser for lesbiancauses. She also works with the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s
History helping to preserve lesbian voices and experience.
Janet Mason last wrote for Sinister Wisdom #76 “The Open Issue” andfor #70 “30th Anniversary Issue.” Her literary commentary is regularly
featured on This Way Out, an international LGBT radio syndicate aired on
more than 400 radio stations in the U.S. and also in Australia, New
Zealand, and throughout Europe. Her three chapbooks of poetry include
When I Was Straight (Insight To Riot Press) and a woman alone (Cycladic
Press) written about her travels in Greece. Her novel Hitching To Nirvana
was published in 2010 (Cycladic Press). She teaches at Temple University
in Philadelphia and more of her work can be found atwww.amusejanetmason.com.
Charlotte Mew was a British poet and short-story writer, born inBloomsbury in 1869. Virginia Woolf called her the greatest living poetess,and Marianne Moore, a quarter of a century after Mew’s death, considered
her work “above praise.” Although not explicitly lesbian, Mew’s poetry,according to scholar James Najarian, “encodes the emotional pain ofhiding her lesbian identity in a world of compulsory heterosexuality.” Herpassionate feelings for the writer Ella D’Arcy and for the novelist May
Sinclair were not returned, and loss and isolation are major themes of herwork. Three of her siblings died in childhood, and two others were
institutionalized for insanity. Mew killed herself in a London nursing
home in 1928, fearing that the breakdown she had undergone following thedeaths of her mother and one of her sisters marked the advent of insanity.
Her first collection of poetry, The Farmer’s Bride, was published in 1915,
and the second volume, The Rambling Sailor came out the year after her

Fall 2010 101

death. Many believe that her work has never received the recognition thatit deserved.
Catherine McNeil, singer-songwriter from Vancouver, BC, the recipientof Milieu’s Emerging Writer’s Contest for her first collection of poetry
Under the Influence, has poems from her new manuscript Emily andElspeth in Queer Chroma (England), Rampike and One Cool Word.
Publications include West Coast Line, Event, Capilano Review, Whetstone
and many anthologies including: Exact Fare Two (Arsenal) and The Fed
Anthology (Arsenal).
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950.) Much loved author of lyric
poems and dramatic verse, she was also known for her Bohemian years inGreenwich Village where she acted and wrote for, the Provincetown
Playhouse. During her life she had many relationships with women andmen. In 1923 she married Eugen Jan Boissevain. 1923 was also the year
she won the Pulitzer Prize – the first woman to receive this honor.
Pat Parker was a Black lesbian feminist and poet. She was a mother, alover and an advocate for the minority voice. Her works are an essential
part of lesbian and feminist herstory, and her revolutionary voice still
speaks to generations of women and lesbians through her printed words.
Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore. Her mother wasProtestant and her father an “assimilated Jew.” Rich’s work was influenced
by Muriel Rukeyser. Her work also emerged from the collective effort in
the mid-seventies of feminist writers to confront issues such as racism,
anti-Semitism, class, sexual identity, and homophobia. Rich was deeply
engaged with the dialogic poetry of June Jordan. Rich and her partner
Michelle Cliff edited Sinister Wisdom during its early years (1981-1983).
Rich has published 30 books of poetry and prose. Her work and has been
the recipient of numerous awards and has been widely translated. Diving
into the Wreck (1973), winner of the National Book Award, opened a placein the public sphere for lesbian poetry. Recent titles include A Human Eye:
Essays on Art in Society, 1996-2008, and The School Among the Ruins:
Poems 2000-2004, winner of the Book Critics Circle Award.
Born in New York City, December 15, 1913, Muriel Rukeyser attended
Vassar and spent a short time at Roosevelt Aviation School. She published
Theory of Flight, the Yale Younger Poets winner, in 1935; then, A Turning
Wind; Waterlily Fire; The Speed of Darkness, Breaking Open, among
others, and translations from the Spanish and Swedish. Pivotal politicalevents of the world, including the Scottsboro trial, West Virginia's Gauley
Bridge tragedy, the civil war in Spain, and American aggression in Viet
Nam, made a lasting impact on her life and poetry. Naming the place oflove in the world, and fighting against dehumanizing categorization andbrutality made her feminism and bisexuality a wide, politicalconsciousness. Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century", on thetheme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and102 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books. She developed
engaged forms of witness and offered vision to the play of science, poetry
and questions of technology; while documenting her own emotional
experience as a sexual being, and mother. Courageous expansions of form
mark her long poems and biographies of Thomas Harriot, Willard Gibbs
and Wendell Wilkie. When her attempt to visit poet Kim Chi Ha on deathrow in South Korea, as PEN's representative, was thwarted, she wrote thetitle poem, "The Gates," for her last collection in response. Rukeyser diedon 12 February 1980. Available: A Muriel Rukeyser Reader; The Collected
Poems of Muriel Rukeyser; The Life of Poetry; Houdini: A Musical; The
Orgy.
Sappho—her name is spelled Psappho in Aeolic Greek—was bornsometime between 630 and 612 BCE on the island of Lesbos and she diedaround 570 BCE. She is the inventor of lyric poetry, that is poetry written
to be sung accompanied by the lyre. She wrote in Aeolian Greek and she
also invented the myxolydian mode, a musical mode, but sadly her music islost. Her poems are spare and simple but their emotional intensity is huge.
Nine books of poetry are recorded by her sorted according to meter, mostof it fragmentary. One poem is complete, several are substantial; thefragmentary nature of most of her work makes her all the more elusive.
The most recent poem of hers to be discovered was published in 2005 andconcerns the subject of getting old.
Ruth L. Schwartz, from Oakland, CA, has published four books of poetry
and a memoir, and has received more than a dozen national awards for her
poetry. She is currently on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A.
program at Ashland University. Also a lifelong student of consciousness
and healing, Ruth has a private healing practice(www.HeartMindIntegration.com) and teaches writing workshops
worldwide (www.TheWriterAsShaman.com).
Maureen Seaton's recent publications are Cave of the Yellow
Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2009), poems, and Sex Talks to Girls(University of Wisconsin Press, Living Out Series, 2008), winner of theLambda Literary Award for lesbian memoir. Her previous collections
include Venus Examines Her Breast (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2004), winnerof the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for lesbian poetry; Furious
Cooking (University of Iowa Press, 1996), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prizeand the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry; and Fear of Subways(The Eighth Mountain Press, 1991), winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry
Prize. Two collaborative works are due in 2011: Stealth, with Samuel Ace(Chax Press); and Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand
Bluebirds, winner of the Sentence Book Award (Firewheel Editions), with
Neil de la Flor. Seaton teaches poetry at the University of Miami. Her
interest in Amy Lowell is purely romantic. She’s happy to share thatinterest with others in every way possible—poetic and polyamorous.
SJ Sindu (www.sjsindu.com) was born in Sri Lanka and came to the U.S.

Fall 2010 103

at the age of seven. Ze writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and cultural
criticism focused on the experiences of minority voices. Hir work iscentered on the life experiences of those who live on the margins of society
and in the borderlands between identities.
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) Our famous American living in Paris in
the early years of avant-garde art and literature. She lived with her partner
Alice B. Toklas from 1907 – 1946, and their salon at 27 Rue de Flores was acenter for artists and writers. Her book The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas brought her fame (and a tour) in America. Other books included
The Making of Americans and Four Saints in Three Acts. (Anne MacKay
notes that she had the privilege of meeting Alice B. Toklas in the summerof 1949.)
Sandra H. Tarlin was born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1957. Her
upbringing included the observance of Jewish ritual and the study ofJewish ethics. The anti-war movement, civil rights, and desegregation
played a strong role in her childhood in the Boston area. During theeighties she lived and worked in New York City in order to be close to theemerging lesbian feminist writing community. Tarlin is Associate
Professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY. She received
her Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Houston.
Her poems have appeared in such journals as Ark/angel Review, Bridges,
Mobius, Poetica, and Western Humanities Review. She has been therecipient of the PSCUNY grant, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for
Poems on the Jewish Experience, and the Inprint Barthelme Fellowshipfor Poetry. While living in Houston she was an events curator for Voices
Breaking Boundaries.
For nearly twenty years, Charzette Torrence (affectionately known as“Charlie T”) has captured unforgettable moments and documented thepower of the human spirit. A quiet yet highly perceptive observer of life,
Charlie T. will tell you that she aims to be the best woman photographer
the world has eve known. In 1993, Charlie was the first African-American
graduate of the photography program at Detroit’s renowned art school
College for Creative Studies and produced her first one-woman show
entitled For My People, exhibited at the Detroit Repertory (later displayed
at the Michigan Junior League, Detroit Artist Market, and Art In Generalin New York.) Currently Charlie has an impressive portfolio of celebrity
photography including Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys, Ray Jay, Ellen
Degeneres, and Chaka Kahn. Her published works can be seen in BlackEnterprise, Code, Hue, Essence, and Emerge.
Meg Torwl is an interdisciplinary artist, working in
Writing/Performance, Radio, Video, New Media, Arts Advocacy. Her work
has been published, performed, broadcast, screened, and exhibited in
Canada, USA, UK, and New Zealand. Her writing has been published in
Knowing ME, Spin, Eat these Sweet Words, Linescapes, Nuestra Voz, andher recent poetry chapbook (in) valid. She has a degree in Social Policy,

104 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

and is a commentator with the NZ Disability Media Collective. She has
produced three new media projects and four documentaries, which are
distributed by Video Out, Canada. She produced and presented 50 halfhour radio programs for Radio New Zealand National, including a 6 partseries on Disability, Relationships, and Sexuality in 2008; and The Youngand the Mutated—dealing with cancer in 2007. She was commissioned in2009 by Balancing Acts, to write and perform a solo interdisciplinary show
That’s so gay! —about solidarity across lines of gender, race, disability,
sexuality; and species. She is currently working on a book of short stories,
and a book of poetry—The Synesthete and the Kinesthete. Some of her
work is held by LAGANZ—the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand.
Her work can be found online at http://integrialmedia.blogspot.com/.
Chocolate Waters has been writing and publishing poetry for over four
decades. During the second wave of feminism she was one of the first
openly lesbian poets to publish, and her contribution has recently been
documented in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975 (edited by
Barbara Love). Her first three collections: To the man reporter from theDenver Post, Take Me Like A Photograph and Charting New Waters are
considered classics of the early women’s movement. In addition to her
work as a writer, Waters was also a founding mother of the early feminist
newspaper, Big Mama Rag, which was produced in Denver, Colorado from1972-1982. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts
fellowship in Poetry, a fellowship from the Barbara Deming Memorial
Fund and was recently awarded a “fruitie” for the best poetry performancein the 2006 Fresh Fruit Festival held in Manhattan. Her poetry, which has
won many individual awards in addition to being nominated for several
Pushcart prizes, is widely published and anthologized. Currently hailed as
the "Poet Laureate of Hell’s Kitchen,” Waters is also a pioneer in the art ofperformance poetry. She has toured throughout the United States, but
makes her home in Manhattan where she teaches poetry workshops, runs asubmission service for serious poets, tutors individual clients and is often aparticipant in the New York City poetry circuit. Waters' limited-edition CD
entitled Chocolate Waters Uncensored, spans 25 years of the poet's
groundbreaking performance work from the NYC nightclub S.N.A.F.U. andother Manhattan venues. Her latest project, a new CD entitled, Do Birds
Get Breast Cancer?, will be released later this year. She is also in theprocess of producing two full-length collections: I Was A Closet Woman
and Illusion Junkie Downtown. A chapbook, The Woman Who Wouldn’t
Shake Hands, will be published in 2010 by Poets Wear Prada.

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106 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

In Memoriam
Judy Freespirit, architect of the fat liberation movement,
and all-around lesbian feminist activist, died in S. F. on
September 10, 2010, from natural causes. She was 74.
Freespirit was a founding member of the Fat Undergroundand the theater groups Fat Chance and Fat Lip Teaders
Theater. In Los Angeles, where she lived for many years
before moving to the S. F. Bay Area, she worked as a memberof the Radical Therapy Collective, helping women's groups
resolve conflict. She worked tirelessly for disabled rights andLGBT people on a hundred fronts, continuing to organize in
the Jewish Home for the Aged in S. F., where she lived for thelast three years as the only "out" resident. She published andperformed in many venues across the U. S. and changed
thousands - if not millions - of women's lives. A memorial
page has been set up for her
at: http://judyfreespirit.wordpress.com where anyone canpost. A public memorial will be held at the end of October inthe Bay Area.
Frances Ann Day passed away on September 24, 2010 ather home in Sebastapol, CA. Fran was the editor of Sinister
Wisdom from 2004 until 2010. This is a great loss for Fran's
friends and her extended community, including Sinister
Wisdom. Fran was an activist, writer and educator who
worked for the dignity and freedom of lesbians and all women.
Cards and letters can be sent to Fran’s partner, Roxanna
Fiamma, PO Box 1180, Sebastopol, CA 95473-1180.

Fall 2010 107

Copyright Acknowledgments“The Images” reprinted from A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far by Adrienne
Rich. Copyright  1981 by Adrienne Rich. Used with permission of the publisher,
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“When We Are Shaken Out” reprinted from School Among the Ruins by Adrienne
Rich. Copyright  2004 by Adrienne Rich. Used with permission of the publisher,
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Power” and “Love Poem” reprinted from The Collected Poems of Audre
Lorde by Audre Lorde. Copyright  1997 by the Audre Lorde Estate. Used withpermission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Sonnet 21” reprinted from Love, Death, and the Changing of the
Seasons by Marilyn Hacker. Copyright  1986 by Marilyn Hacker. Used withpermission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Evening on Lesbos” copyright 1928, 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma
Millay Ellis. Reprinted with permission of Elizabeth Barnett, the Millay Society.
“Artemis to Aphrodite” from Healy, Eloise Klein. The Islands Project: Poems for
Sappho. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2007, pg. 29.
“and/Freedom is my name” by Sharon Bridgforth,  2010.
(Excerpt)lovve/rituals & rage by Sharon Bridgforth  1993. Performed by The root
wy’mn Theatre Company“The Fire” by Joan Larkin is from Housework.
“What Do I Give You?” and “The Transgress” by Muriel Rukeyser
from The Speed of Darkness, reprinted with permission from Bill Rukeyser.
“Slowly: A Plainsong from an Older Woman to a Younger Woman” from love
belongs to those who do the feeling (Red Hen Press, 2008) by Judy Grahn,
reprinted by permission of publisher. Copyright 2008 by Judy Grahn.
“Dear Mrs.” [2921-3] and the last line of “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights” : “Ican be anything and everything and it is always always alright”, that are housed in
the Beinecke Manuscript Library, are used with permission of Stanford G. Gunn,
Jr., Literary Executor, Estate of Gertrude Stein.
“from bough breaks” by Tamiko Beyer was originally published in A Joint Called
Pauline, Issue 1, Winter 2010.
“Of Forbidden Love,” “The Artist,” “Love’s Acolyte,” “To the Unknown Goddess,”
Copyright © Elsa Gidlow 1976. Previously published in Sapphic Songs: Seventeen
to Seventy, Diana Press 1976. With permission of Marcelina Martin Executor of
Elsa Gidlow Estate and Director of Druid Heights Artists Retreat. U.S. Copyright
Office 1989.
“The Poet,” Copyright © Adrienne Bradley 1998.
“Blue,” “Je t’Adore,” “Mountain,” Copyright © Meg Torwl 1999.
“Disturbance” was first published in Sinister Wisdom in 1978; it also was included
in Chocolate’s second collection, Take Me Like A Photograph, 1977, Eggplant
Press, Denver, CO.
“A Parting” by Jewelle Gomez used with permission of the author.
“January Vineyards” by Ruth L. Schwartz used with permission of the author.

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Fall 2010 109

A Midsummer Night's Press announces a call for submissions for MILKAND HONEY: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry, edited by
Julie R. Enszer. Deadline: November 30, 2010. Poems that celebrate andquestion, meditate and intimate, argue and reconcile contemporary queer
Jewish identity. What is queer Jewish experience in the twenty-first
century? What poetry expresses queer Jewishness today? Submit yourwork by email, as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format, toqueerjewishpoetry@gmail.com.

110 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.

Fall 2010 111

Lavender Review is a new biannual e-zine dedicated to poetry and art
by, about, and for lesbians, including whatever might appeal to a lesbian
readership. The theme of Issue 2 is Epithalamion; the deadline forsubmissions is December 1, 2010; and the issue will be published in
January, 2011. Please submit up to six unpublished poems in the body ofan email to mary.meriam@gmail.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~marymeriam/Lavender/

112 Sinister Wisdom #81 – Lesbian Poetry: When? And Now.