Me and Martha

I began the Martha Courtot section of This Frenzy accidentally—there was a poem of hers that I loved, “Lesbian Bears,” and hadn’t been able to find for years and years. When her family and friends issued her collected poems after her death I finally had the poem again so posted it. There was nothing about [...]

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April 21 – When you took me down

When you took me down you placed 1 pomegranate seed on my tongue sweet sweet blood          I begged then for the 5 still in hand When you offered me 6 more I offered you my breasts         you crushed seeds in your teeth licked until my nipples dripped red Thus I came to owe you 1 year [...]

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we are never the first of our kind

On today’s Writer’s Almanac I found this wonderful love letter from Vita to Virginia, January 21st, 1926. It’s so easy to believe, as we invent and re-invent love and being lesbian, that we are New In The World. Granted, love may FEEL ever-new, but this speaks to me and for me in an immediate, right [...]

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Dear dainty delicious darling

Gertrude Stein—how we’ve been told you are obtuse, impossible, all but meaningless, when in fact you are loving, inventive, playful, sexual, flirtatious, silly. Why has it been easier for the world to imagine Gertrude as a stern remote genius than as a woman of brilliant mind and wit passionately in love with another woman? Wonder [...]

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Amazon in the land of oranges—Joan Larkin

Some Unsaid Things Joan Larkin, Amazon Poetry, 1975 I was not going to say how you lay with me nor where your hands went & left their light impressions nor whose face was white as a splash of moonlight nor who spilled the wine nor whose blood stained the sheet nor which one of us [...]

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Amazon in the land of oranges—Eleanor Lerman

Finally I See Your Skin Eleanor Lerman in Amazon Poetry, 1975 Finally I see your skin so scarred by my use that I can close my eyes and tell you where the constant embrace of my fingers is turned to gold on your stomach, and the press of my legs has turned your thighs to [...]

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Amazon in the land of oranges—Marcie Hershman

Making Love to Alice Marcie Hershman from Amazon Poetry, 1975 I imagine Gertrude making love to Alice her generous and wise mouth upon her breast her arms around hers the two bodies fitting together, strangely they are different and wonderfully they are together. Gertrude being warm and full and with Alice and Alice being warm [...]

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Amazon in the land of oranges—Martha Courtot

i am a woman in ice Martha Courtot i am a woman in ice melting piece by piece slowly i am divested of the cold cage sharp as glass the splinters fall at my feet do not cut yourself when i listen to the trains wail i can feel through underground caverns of stalactal promises [...]

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Amazon Poetry in a land of oranges

I’ve been re-reading the anthology Amazon Poetry, edited by Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin and published in 1975 by Out and Out Books. It is the first-ever openly lesbian poetry collection. Wow. First ever. For everyone who’s come out post-Ellen, stop to consider this—a time when there was no such thing as a collection of [...]

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in case you ever need an epitaph for me

you can always borrow this, from Apuleius’ Apology, written about Sappho: She was a woman of Lesbos too, who wrote lasciviously yet with such grace that she reconciles us to her outrageous speech through the sweetness of her songs.

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