Spectacle: Possession

A woman wears a blue dress. It is
Sunday. Red cardinals sing
along the sill. She cuts
her neck with an electric
carving knife. A woman is blue.
She is red. She wears
the Sunday blues. Carves
cardinals into an electric
red dress. Her neck
sings electric. Sunday wears on.
A knife sings before it cuts.
On the sill, Sunday carves
the necks of cardinals. Knives
wear red. Sunday dresses
along the sill. Sing
said the cardinal.
Sing said the knife.
A woman is electric.
Her neck is a sill.
Cardinal sing the Sunday
reds in her electric neck.
A woman is a carving.
A woman is a knife.
A woman.

2

A woman rises to a knock at her door,
a stone strikes her head as her ex-
husband plunges in, clutching
a rock and a carving
knife. He can’t cope
with a prefix meaning no longer
or lacking so he whittles it
from her forehead, criss-
crossing her face with a blade
made for slicing steak.

Their thirteen-year-old daughter witnesses,
from a corner, strapped to her
shadow in shock, her mouth
open, spilling the word stop
that circles the room in a boomerang
returning to splinter her throat, her father’s
ears. The man looks up from his white
shirt, Rolex, ox-blood Gucci shoes
splashed with his ex-wife and says
I’m sorry to his daughter as the woman’s
breath jags from collapsed lungs.

3

I am always burying something:
cardinals with shattered wings,
orange peels, smell of your dress
as it dries on the windowsill.

You come to me bearing
poppies, birds and glass,
a carving knife.
Your body a hieroglyph.

You want me to whittle you
down into an amulet;
a tooth necklace to
wear as a token.

In the kitchen’s carnivorous light,
you and I are too much alike;
the skull’s opalescent curve,
milkweed smelling skeleton,

bones tattered as lace.
Like lightning. Electric.
When i move you carve yourself out of me

humming the mean reds
and the Sunday blues.
Sing say the birds.
Sing say the bones.

Simone Muench

(Simone Muench is poetry editor of ACM. She was raised in Benson, Louisiana and Combs, Arkansas before moving to Colorado to receive her BA and MA from the University of Colorado. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in Paris Review, Indiana Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Bellingham Review and Pool. One of her poems will appear in Iowa Press’s upcoming Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America edited by Ryan G. Van Cleave and Virgil Suarez.

She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, the Charles Goodnow Award, the AWP Intro Journals Project Award and the Poetry Center’s 9th Annual Juried Reading Award. Her book The Air Lost in Breathing received the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry and was published by Helicon Nine in 2000. New Michigan Press released her chapbook Notebook, and Knife from Mentholatum in 2003. She was one of the Fine Lines Poetry Contest winners co-sponsored by Olay and the Poetry Society of America, and judged by Sonia Sanchez, Sapphire, Lee Ann Brown, Marilyn Chin, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez and Jill Bialosky. Recently, her manuscript Drowning by the Light of Oranges, aka Lampblack and Ash, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry from Sarabande Books. Simone Muench’s poems were described by James Tate as volatile explosives, circling beauty, while Anne Waldman says Muench’s poetry is musical assured, seductive, displaying a highly engaged imagination.)

Up On The Downs

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.

The Raiment We Put On

Do you remember? We were in a room
With walls as warm as anybody’s breath,
And music wove us on its patterning loom,
The complicated loom of life and death.
Your hands moved over my face like small clouds.
(Rain fell into a river and sank, somewhere.)
I moved among your fingers, brushed by the small crowds
Of them, feeling myself known, everywhere,
And in that desperate country so far from here,
I heard you say my name over and over,
Your voice threading its way into my ear.
I will spend my days working to discover
The pattern and its meaning, what you meant,
What has been raveled and what has been rent.

Kelly Cherry

my dear witch

‘When did I stop being of use to you? Why did you throw me away when I needed you the most?’

Diana, as Nora understood her, smiled. ‘I have never left you, my dear witch. You, like all the others, breathe for me…You are my eyes in your world, my feet to run, and my hands to heal. How could I ever throw away the body which sustains me?’

A. Kenley
The Crestview Witches

TOYS FOR TURNING ON AND GETTING OFF

While many people play without genital sex, we’re strong advocates for having as much sex as possible – so our toy collections tend to include lots of gadgets for getting people aroused and giving them orgasms.

Dildoes and butt plugs give bottoms (and tops! ) that wonderful filled-up feeling that makes orgasms so much more worthwhile. Assholes in particular do not take well to being harshly stretched – insert plugs and such only after plenty of preparatory finger play, v-e-r-y gradually and gently, and don’t go for the Guinness book on plug size unless you know your bottom can handle it. Use lots and lots and lots and lots of lube (one top we know says “If there isn’t lube dripping from the ceiling, you haven’t used enough”) . If anything b urns or creates a sharp or tearing pain, stop immediately – either fix the situation that’s causing the pain, or move on to another activity. Butt toys need to have a wide flange at the bottom so they don’t get lost in the rectum – a lost toy is at best uncomfortable and embarrassing, and at worst a serious emergency.

Vaginas are less picky about what gets inserted in them, although scrupulous cleanliness is essential for anything that goes into a vagina. Still, the sensation of being hurt or bumped deep inside is not erotic to most women. We suggest that if you like to play with dildoes and other insertables, you acquire a few different sizes and shapes, and keep track of which bottoms like which – or, better yet, encourage your bottoms to own their own dildoes that are exactly the size and shape they like, and that get used only on them.

Toys can give you genitals other than the ones nature gave you. If you have a vagina, you can s trap on a penis, or insert one into yourself and still have one left over for a friend. If you want a bigger or harder penis, open the drawer and take one out. Ever wish you had a penis on your leg, or your face? Or that you could have two penises, one for each hole? Use your imagination – and your MasterCard.

Cocks like constriction. Those veins we see on the outside of a penis are the exit path for the blood that makes erections; the arteries that bring the blood in are buried deep inside. Many men find that when you constrict from the outside, with, for instance, a cock ring, or some bondage made with thin rope, or a few condoms, the amount of blood in the cock increases – and so does the erection. Some men also love the sensation of having their balls pulled away from the body, and tops who play with such men often stock special devices called “parachutes” and weights for this purpose – heavy brass bells are particularly charming, although Janet once improvised a ball weight from a tube sock and a jar of pennies. Although we lack the proper equipment to confirm these reports, we are told such activities feel good. We are told this appreciatively. Enthusiastically. Loudly.

Own lots of lube. Yes , good water-based lube is expensive – but you paid more for that half-gallon of premium ice cream YOU polished off last week, and we bet you didn’t enjoy it half as much. Lube is important for good sex and essential for good safer sex. Don’t be stingy.

Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy

The New Topping Book

I’m hardly more than a symptom

Is it so great for women now? I’m not convinced. We can disregard the media but nonetheless its propaganda surrounds us…When people talk about my work they talk about whether or not it’s memoir. They talk about genre. They don’t even want to talk about my writing. I have lots of good answers, but they just can’t decide what I’m doing. Like I signed up to listen to them muse. It’s so about being female. They just can’t trust that I know what I’m doing. I mean, to be this far in your life and to be in such an arena of specialty and to be endlessly questioned like you’re the secretary. Of course. How would I know what art is? Some guy interviewed me and he clearly hadn’t read my book, and he asked me why I didn’t think it was memoir. I told him in great detail and very carefully and wisely I thought and then he said “Got it.” Like impatiently, like would I please shut up. I mean he hadn’t read it. But he was impatient with me. I think I’m hardly more than a symptom. It’s not so good. I guess I’m wondering why anyone thinks I’m a woman. I think that’s more interesting. I wonder why I should even be interviewed as a woman. If they can decide what my book is why can’t I decide what I am? I mean I know I can in our queer world—that’s a given—but in the literary world…Since a woman is one who “doesn’t know,” why shouldn’t we just refuse our gender? What would be the answer? Rape?

EILEEN MYLES
MY NEED TO SAY

always vulnerable

he never wrote me poems. we would fuck in his car or on his bed where others girls had been or in the shower or while i was crying. we saw each other naked so often i have the image painted on the back of my eyelids. he ripped my underwear off. i was always vulnerable. i woke him up with kisses, he woke me up with hickies. for a long time, i thought they were the same thing.

i asked him once while we both got high why it was that i could write novels about him until the words got tired of being anagrams of his name – but at the same time he would never reciprocate. he blew a smoke ring and broke it with his finger. “dunno,” he said. we would fuck again later.

i found him once sitting on my floor staring at a picture from when i was young. “god,” he said, “i really fucked you up.”

Source HERE

ancient power spots

Throughout Europe there were people who continued to worship the old Gods in the old ways. The church’s frustration over this led it to destroy sacred trees and groves, pollute healing wells and springs, and build their own churches and cathedrals on ancient power spots where people had communed with spirits and deities since Neolithic times. Even today many churches and Christian sites, such as Lourdes, Fatima, and Chartres, are built on sites that were sacred to the Goddess and the old Gods throughout history. They will probably continue to be places of power and inspiration long after the Christian churches disappear. In many churches and cathedrals in Europe I was happy to find images of imps and dwarfs, the little people of Celtic lore, that the pagan artisans chiselled into the stonework to honour our ancestors. The little people are still there. Their power is still present. I have felt it.

Laurie Cabot
Power of the witch

a long time to go without sex

630,720,000 seconds without sex. And each of those seconds like a lifetime. For time has no meaning in the abyss. Hundreds of years can go by in a moment or a second can drag out for a thousand years. And that’s a long time to go without sex. A very long time.

Anna Taborska
Dirty Dybbuk

ASTRAL PROJECTION (how to do it)

Start by selecting a peaceful place and time of the day where you will not be disturbed. Although this exercise can be done in a chair, it is best to lie flat on your back on a firm, but not hard, surface. Next, stretch out and loosen your clothing. Relax. Follow your breath, fixing your consciousness totally on the breathing process. Make a conscious effort to go completely limp. Begin with your feet and, working upwards, relax all of the muscles in your body. This should take about four or five minutes. While in this relaxed state, visualize your inner self becoming light and lifting free of the physical body. Imagine yourself floating directly above the body as though you were on a cloud of air. Allow yourself to experience this feeling for about five minutes and then slowly lower yourself (your astral self) back into your body. Do this exercise several times until you feel comfortable floating and then continue with the next step. Once you are free of the body, walk into another room. Go slowly and take the time to examine everything in the room. Take note of pictures, how furniture is arranged, and where objects of interest are. Do this exercise several times, and then have someone rearrange the room just prior to your journey. After you have returned to your body, write down exactly what you saw and where everything was positioned. Return to the room and check on your accuracy. The results will then indicate if you actually did astrally project.

Lady Sabrina

The Witch’s Master Grimoire: An Encyclopaedia of Charms, Spells, Formulas, and Magical Rites