Was it like…oh, I don’t know…flying?

I went to see this guy – doctor’s orders – and before I knew it
I was spread, pins sticking out all over me:
a pineapple hedgehog on my mother’s buffet table.
I did so want it to work, for the ghosts to flee
from each punctured co-ordinate
with a thwarted hiss, for my brain to go pfffff like a tire.
But it’s the same with everything these days, a quick fix –
sex, hot baths, analysis.
It’s like the old-school trick of snatching the table cloth off in one seamless swoop –
you’re still left with the crockery, the plates,
the empty fruit bowl.

Is life better now?
Do you feel different?
How?

What was it like ?
Did it feel like…?
Did it feel
O

Louise Peterkin

this wondrous city

To step out into the streets of London is to walk in the foots-steps of Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, John Dryden and Lord Byron. Since the time of Chaucer, writers as diverse as Herman Melville and Barbara Cartland have worked, played and loved in London. Many of the greatest books ever written can trace their origins to this wondrous city.

Carrie Kania and Alan Oliver
Writers’ London: A Guide to Literary People and Places

my body pursues its own ideas…

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas – for my body does not have the same ideas I do.

Roland Barthes
The Pleasure of the Text

Night

Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day take on a new and deeper meaning.

Elie Wiesel
Dawn

Looking in a way that was forbidden

I wanted to touch her. The reflecting image of a woman with a woman is seductive. I enjoyed looking at her in a way that was forbidden to me, this self on self, self as desirer and desired, had a frankness to it I had not been invited to discover. Desiring her I felt my own desirability. It was an act of power but not power over her. I was my own conquest.

Her breasts as my breasts, her mouth as my mouth, were more than Narcissus hypnotised by his own likeness. [….] You see, I could have rested there beside her, perhaps forever, it felt like forever, a mirror confusion of bodies and sighs, undifferentiated, she in me, me in she and no longer exhausted by someone else’s shape over mine.

Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

need carbohydrates

Jay is always hungry, always. She keeps a bag of nuts in her backpack, dried fruit sealed in cellophane in a bowl on her dresser, snack packs of crackers and cheese in her locker at the gym. When we go out to the women’s bar, she drinks one beer in three hours but eats half a dozen packages of smoked almonds. Her last girlfriend was Italian and she used to serve Jay big batches of pasta with homemade sausage marinara. “I need carbohydrates,” Jay insists, eating slices of potato bread smeared with sweet butter. I cook grits for her, with melted butter and cheese, fry slabs of cured ham I get from a butcher who swears it has no nitrates.

Dorothy Allison
A Lesbian Appetite