And his fingers didn’t smell of smoke, he didn’t
nudge me onto my back, like you did, grunting
as he unzipped my jeans, complaining
you’re so bony, and demanding, Now you do something –
hold it like this. David took my virginity
in a room scented with white roses, having smoothed
the sheets himself, slotted ‘How Can I be Sure?’
into the tape machine. And when we were done
he didn’t roll off, zip up and slouch downstairs
to watch the end of Match of the Day with my brother,
oh no, not David. He washed me, patted me dry
with fat blue towels, his eyes brim-full of tears.
A Man Greets His Wife from Her Short Break Away
Rebecca Goss
The first thing they do is embrace.
Fat smiles stay on their faces
all the way to the restaurant.
He eats ribs with sticky, podgy fingers.
She bites chicken wings with shiny lips.
They have a pudding each and share another.
In the car, she tells him about a girl she saw,
with a short, spotted skirt that flapped
around one long limb.
‘There wasn’t even a stump to satisfy me,
just a space where the leg should’ve been.’
‘Was she very pretty?’
‘Yes she was.’
They stop talking and at traffic lights
he strokes her thigh, instead of saying
how sad her story sounds. Quietly, he resents the one-legged girl
for changing the mood between them, resents his wife
for telling him the tale at all.
Making love to her later, it’s a pretty teenager
sitting astride his wide belly. One leg tucked behind,
leaving the torso, smooth and deformed, moving over him.
Wanting to Think
Michael Schmidt
Why, when I want to think of you, do I think of him?
He may be dead, and yet he still lies with you
Warming his calloused hands between your thighs.
He may still be alive, and his lips for ever
Puckered on your nipple, above your heart.
I want to think about you in my arms, the way we were
For a while. Then he came out of nowhere to stay.
He was tall, and golden, stripped to the waist, when we sawed
And chopped all autumn the firewood, heaped it
Outside your kitchen door. You were always watching;
You patted him on the back and sniffed the air
Pungent with our sweat, you caught his smell.
That autumn, when I lay with you, you started pretending
These hands of mine were his hands in the dark, these lips
His and the tufts in my armpits his and you inhaled
Hungry, pressed against me, pressed against
A man you were imagining in my place:
Shaping, stretching me to fit your bed; no wonder
When I think of you, as I do, each day and night, I think
Of what you were thinking of, how you watched as I watched you,
How as autumn ended, just before you left
That night, noiseless, away with him for good,
I came upon him at twilight in a clearing.
After the weeks we’d mutely worked together,
Till dark we rested in the deep cool grass without a word.
While all the time I loved you, as I love you,
He lay with me and he was satisfied,
I lay with him and not for a minute thought
Of how you watched through the screen door, but only
How musky, how good he smelled, and his hand on my chest.
3
‘A NIGHT PICKED FROM A HUNDRED AND ONE’
Imperial
Don Paterson
Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I’m frightened –
I covered her mouth with my own;
she lay in my arms till the storm-window brightened
and stood at our heads like a stone
After months of jaw-jaw, determined that neither
win ground, or be handed the edge,
we gave ourselves up, one to the other
like prisoners over a bridge
and no trade was ever so fair or so tender;
so where was the flaw in the plan,
the night we lay down on the flag of surrender
and woke on the flag of Japan
Viginty Alley
Tim Liardet
I was thrown, you might say, on the mercy
Of her knowledge. Were there less, there’d be plenty:
Undo this, she softly cajoled, no, this.
Miles away, her slant green eyes slid up
To the contingencies of cloud ebbing over the sidings.
When she wrote it there on the subway wall
In an unbookish hand as deep red as Chianti
She dropped, like she dropped her gaze, the r and i –
X marks the spot. Here’s where the mammer’s boy
Lost his viginty.
It, whatever it was, indeed was lost
Along with the gormless and the donkey-voiced,
Along with all sense of ingenuous folly
Once the chemicals started to boil in the pit.
It was lost there, or left, or merely discarded
Like creaky, unbroken shoes, like out-of-season holly.
It was lost, or merely dumped
Along with everything else no longer of use
Down at the deep end of Viginty Alley.
Outside
Robert Frant
I thought you’d stop my searching touch
Although you wanted just as much
To have me on this crowded route;
Your denim skirt, my soft dark suit,
But even though we could be seen
I ached to feel myself between
Your legs, to sense the moistness there
For me if I would only dare.
I slid your skirt above your hips,
Your naked neck against my lips
Then eased my hardness into you.
A gasp, a moan, my hardness grew.
The people never dropped their pace
Not knowing that our close embrace
Was hiding something known to just
We two: our deep, impatient lust.
Amores 1.5
Ovid
A hot afternoon: siesta-time. Exhausted,
I lay sprawled across my bed.
One window-shutter was closed, the other stood half-open,
And the light came sifting through
As it does in a wood. It recalled that crepuscular glow at sunset
Or the trembling moment between darkness and dawn,
Just right for a modest girl whose delicate bashfulness
Needs some camouflage. And then –
In stole Corinna, long hair tumbled about her
Soft white throat, a rustle of summer skirts,
Like some fabulous Eastern queen en route to her bridal-chamber –
Or a top-line city call-girl, out on the job.
I tore the dress off her – not that it really hid much,
But all the same she struggled to keep it on:
Yet her efforts were unconvincing, she seemed half-hearted –
Inner self-betrayal made her give up.
When at last she stood naked before me, not a stitch of clothing,
I couldn’t fault her body at any point.
Smooth shoulders, delectable arms (I saw, I touched them),
Nipples inviting caresses, the flat
Belly outlined beneath that flawless bosom,
Exquisite curve of a hip, firm youthful thighs.
But why catalogue details? Nothing came short of perfection,
&
nbsp; And I clasped her naked body close to mine.
Fill in the rest for yourselves! Tired at last, we lay sleeping.
May my siestas often turn out that way!
Trans. Peter Green
The Wasp Station
Paul Johnston
He was sixteen, she in her forties – the classic older woman
scenario, though her hair was shorter than Anne Bancroft’s
and he wasn’t such a dork as Dustin Hoffman.
They didn’t do it in a hotel but in a garden shed, rusty
sickles, shovels and old model railway bits all around.
A wasp was hitting the buffers on the web-wrought window.
His lack of experience hung off him like a fireman’s uniform
as he stammered, bruised lips when he kissed her and grabbed
for her breasts when she ground their groins together.
She opened her blouse and let him lap the c-cup cornucopia,
her nipples rigid as funnels. It was obvious that squeezing his rod
would bring him juddering to the terminus faster than the Flying Scot.
‘Now we take our time,’ she said, reginal. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ his look
bolder despite the stickiness in his boxers. He stripped them off
and wiped himself, then tapped his rapidly rising tool
against her whiter-than-the-driven-steam knickers.
She pulled aside the gusset and let him in. All aboard!
They rode the Orient Express to Paris, Venice, Istanbul,
cities on fire with carnal pleasure. She shrieked as they entered
the tunnel, pistons thundering and steam cocks fully open.
She arrived first, bucking, nails digging into his coal tender.
He squealed and spurted, head back like a plume of wind-whipped smoke,
then panted in her ear, ‘I love you, Aunt Alice.’ She looked away;
the wasp was tangled in the silken threads, its movements lacking vim,
its screech the desperate braking of a soon-to-be-derailed express.
‘Silly boy,’ she said, reversing. ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow, same time.’
Having deposited, she thought, my underwear in a left luggage locker.
He grinned, wondering where his uncle and cousins were; and would be
the next day. Roger at his office near St Pancras, Lily
and Jez blowing out clouds of skunk in the park?
The wasp manages to jab the spider’s belly with its stinger
and in a single tug is free, a sentient yellow-and-black
bullet racketing past them to the station exit.
And Looking Back
A. F. Harrold
Sometimes a hand in or of or from the past can make us come
alive again without our realising what it is that’s being done.
And sometimes bodies find their ways from where they each began,
a surprise curving into the present, into the light, under the hand,
and without warning or comment everything on hold has suddenly begun
and now, it seems, this is not as bad as it could possibly have become
and for a while there’s only time and flesh to pass before the rising sun.
And it happens that tonight is a night picked from a hundred and one
other possible nights, each spinning lost between the stars in the silence from
the closing mouths of kisses and answers and the lover’s tongue
to the morning that in the end is well known to always come.
And looking back what is there that has not yet been remarked upon,
the resistance of memory to education of any form,
or the ritual days of living that nights like this can pluck us from?
Explode
John Etchingham
It’s the way that you say ‘I don’t usually do this’
And seeing your pain all the time mixed with such bliss,
Initial resistance both mental and physical,
Tightness that gives way to depths almost mystical;
Slowly at first, just until you get used to me –
Pushing, I feel you relax so deliciously,
Urging me on I try not to let go, but who
Could keep control? I just have to explode in you.
The Man in the Print Room
Sarah Salway
Now if he’s slow and she gets upset
he’ll move towards her, tease the hair
from her face, lick her tears away.
She lets him tie the straps on her new ankle boots,
teaches him to pull her corset just tight enough,
has sewn fifty pearl buttons on a black sheath dress
he presses into her skin like the photocopier code.
All day she hugs the thought of him close,
how he knows the word of more in every tongue.
La Noche Oscura
San Juan de la Cruz
En una noche oscura,
con ansias en amores inflamada,
(¡oh dichosa ventura!)
salí sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
A oscuras y segura,
por la secreta escala disfrazada,
(¡oh dichosa ventura!)
a oscuras y en celada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
En la noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me veía,
ni yo miraba cosa,
sin otra luz ni guía
sino la que en el corazón ardía.
Aquésta me guïaba
más cierta que la luz del mediodía,
adonde me esperaba
quien yo bien me sabía,
en parte donde nadie parecía.
¡Oh noche que me guiaste!,
¡oh noche amable más que el alborada!,
¡oh noche que juntaste
amado con amada,
amada en el amado transformada!
que entero para él solo se guardaba,
allí quedó dormido,
y yo le regalaba,
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.
El aire de la almena,
cuando yo sus cabellos esparcía,
con su mano serena
en mi cuello hería,
y todos mis sentidos suspendía.
Quedéme y olvidéme,
el rostro recliné sobre el amado,
cesó todo, y dejéme,
dejando mi cuidado
entre las azucenas olvidado.
Dark Night
On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
– oh, happy chance! –
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.
In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised
– oh, happy chance! –
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.
In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide,
save that which burned in my heart.
This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he
(well I knew who!) was awaiting me –
A place where none appeared.
Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined
Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping,
and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.
The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand
He wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.
I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.
i like my body
e. e. cummings
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
Ur Thurs Reidh Ansur
Ros Barber
To you, I taste like sin; tobacco and alcohol
mingling hot-foul and exotic. I get you drunk
against your better judgement, and as I lead you
out, you sway, say no, giddy with the inevitable.
You like beaches? I’ve made love by the Med,
the Channel, the North Atlantic. Then you
follow me onto the abandoned shingle,
the daylight biting your retina. It is too cold