Archives: poetry

New poem out in Strange Horizons

…and when you wander the orchards,
your robe’s light, long sleeves swimming
with your motion, the trees bear fruit
and flower on the same branch—both delicious (of course

I’ve tasted the petals too; if anything I have only become
more curious, knowing now how much more there is
to learn). Or you can roll up those sleeves to do
some gentle garden work, meditative and

invigorating. We do not, of course, need a harvest to eat—hunger
is a memory, starvation a silly rumor—nor blossoms
to add more beauty. You know I never cared much
for flowers, but all beauty is meaningful here, and everything is

beautiful, and everything beautiful
can be trusted.

-excerpt, “From Summerland“

This piece started in my car, as I was driving somewhere on a pleasant spring day and reflecting on how my ideal “heavenly” weather is exactly that–late spring, with lots of sun but not too much warmth. Summer used to be lovely, I guess, before the climate change, but it’s also muggy. If not outright dangerous thanks to fires and heat advisory. And then I have friends who are wild for autumn and even winter, which I find rather depressing.

But! This is not a poem about weather. It’s actually about death. Or after-death. “Summerland” is the name often given to the afterlife in Spiritualism, the religion based in mediumship that sprang up in the 1800s and is still going today. I’m certainly not the first bereaved person to get extremely interested in Spiritualism — in my case I’m not planning to convert (not sure they even do formal ‘conversions’) but it’s often moving to read about. Its paradise is an engaging mixture of the mundane and the spiritual, blissful but flexible, much more so than the constant-singing-praises-to-God-above-the-glassy-sea of the Christianity I grew up with.

So on my drive, I considered who decided Summerland was summery and whether its inhabitants might have other opinions. At my destination, I pulled out the notepad I keep in my car and started writing, considering other details of what this life after life is like, and how it might be described — if it can be. A common complaint mediums delivered from their communicants was just how tricky it was to put these things in words that living people use (a difficulty enhanced by the fact that dead people, as attested to by mediums and by a number of near-death experiencers, don’t speak but rather make use of telepathy). And that also adds a sort of edge to this poem — the uncertainty of communication — because even as I indulge in thoughts of how nice Summerland might be, I can’t yet trust everything beautiful. I’m wary of wish fulfillment when it comes to something as important as death and eternity. I kept writing through that wariness, and the final stanzas came as a sort of answer. Maybe. What do you think?

If nothing else it gets back to one of the themes I’ve written about again and again, which is longing. The basis of eroticism and grief and quite a bit of religion.

Several of the ideas behind the depiction of Summerland in this poem come from a short book by professor and philosopher of religion Stafford Betty, The Afterlife Unveiled. The reference to cigars and sex is about a communication Sir Oliver Lodge believed he received from his son Raymond (who died in World War One), which I first encountered in Colin Wilson’s Afterlife: An Investigation.

Midsummer Updates

I always go into something of a lull in late June and early July. Maybe it’s the heat (although here near the Great Lakes we’ve been much luckier than a lot of people temperature-wise). Maybe it’s the grief-iversary at the end of June. Or my birthday earlier in that month putting me in the cheerier version of a “I deserve to slack off a bit” mood.

The idea of lounging in the air conditioning and reading is just so seductive, you know?

And writing, too! I’ve done a bit of that — when I feel like June was a sunny void, a humid ghost of a month that left no trace, I remind myself I did finish three stories during it.

Plus some of what I’ve been reading are the submissions to Erato II — exciting stuff!

Anyway, here are some quick updates of interest to my fellow readers and writers:

This July, Smashwords is holding its annual Summer/Winter site-wide sale. You’ll find fantastic ebooks discounted 25%, 50%, even 75% or free. This includes a number of my titles.

It also includes the anthologies from the New Smut Project – most are 25% off, but Erato is half-off in honor of our open submissions call for the sequel.

If you don’t have a Smashwords account or would rather buy the book more directly, you can get 50% off the Erato ebook at our Gumroad store by using coupon code “EratoIISubmissions“. Plus remember, with discount code “newsmutprojectfan“ you’ll always get $1.00 off our paperbacks purchased through Gumroad, including Erato.

Do you have a flash fiction, prose poem, short-short story, or <1,500-word excerpt from a longer story you’d like to submit to Erato II? We’re open until August 31st (and can negotiate extensions where necessary – life happens). In the anthology guidelines, I get pretty detailed about the kinds of stories we get excited about, and those we’re more lukewarm about (“sex robots,” longtime readers will recite at this point, even as fans of NSP’s books will fondly remember the stories about robots who have sex – yes, those are different kinds of stories!).

I’ve had a poem published! It’s short and, to no one’s surprise, both sensual and haunting. “Three Years After” appears in Tiny Wren Lit’s first anthology of “tiny poems” (10 lines or shorter), All Poems Are Ghosts.

In somewhat sadder news, I learned this week that SinCyr Publishing is closing its doors. They were a landmark in the erotica press landscape for their creative anthologies (I had a story in a volume of Rule 34) and interest in building a consent culture.

SinCyr’s books are now out of print, though you can get paperback copies secondhand through some online stores. I’ll be looking into ways to reprint the stories I’ve published with them, including “Route 34” from Rule 34, “The Solution” from Dancing With Myself (this one’s actually expanding into a book-length work), and “Silver Bracelets” from the femdom anthology Getting It.

So that’s what my July looks like. Hope yours is going well, readers! Keep cool…except when you can be hot in a fun way.

Poetry

I’ve talked about it in my newsletter and on social media, but I’m not sure I’ve yet broken the news here on this blog that my longstanding interest in reading poetry has, over the past year or so, turned into an interest in writing poetry.

It’s not completely out of nowhere – in 2018 I wrote a poem that appeared in the “Birth Control” issue from the much-missed Cliterature feminist journal. And “By Steam and By Sail,” in Litro, is a prose poem (I was challenging Carole Maso, particularly her Aureole, when I wrote it – indeed the bit of French slang that inspired the whole piece came from the first part of the book, “The Women Wash Lentils”).

Still, it surprised me as much as anyone. The kickoff was when I had some concepts I wanted to write out as stories, but couldn’t quite make work as a thousand+ words of prose. I started writing in lines and stanzas instead, and playing with sounds, and….

Fast forward to this winter, when I received my first acceptance! “Three Years After,” a six-line poem about intimacy and loss, will appear in Tiny Wren Lit’s anthology All Poems Are Ghosts.

Tiny Wren makes beautiful little chapbooks and I look forward to sharing this one with you when it’s published!

Maybe it’s no surprise that quite a few of my poems are about grief – but it’s also no surprise, I’m sure, that a ton of them are about sex. I entered a sheaf of especially queer sex poems (or especially sexy queer poems?) into the 2022 Penrose Prize for Excellence in Poetry from LGBTQIA+ Writers and I’m delighted to share that they made it onto the longlist!

You can see the full list and read the 3 winning poems on the Death Rattle/Oroboro Lit Journal site.

I’ll be looking for final homes for my Penrose entries this year – I really cannot wait to share them with you!

(Also, keep an eye on The Whorticulturalist, who accepted an early and very sexy narrative poem from me last summer.)

In the meantime, I’m continuing to share excerpts of poetry I’ve loved reading on my Tumblr, and also on the Tumblr of the New Smut Project – speaking of which, if you have erotic prose poetry or flash fiction seeking a home, NSP opens to submissions for Erato II, our second anthology of short-short pieces, on April 2nd! Full guidelines are here.

Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, so I’m going to pretend that’s the reason I’ve lately been reading and posting a lot of poetry on my Tumblr. Actually it’s a happy coincidence. I’ve rediscovered poetry, as I do every few years, and this spring I’m making more of an effort to share about the books I read. Thus, quotes on my Tumblr.

Poetry can share big ideas in a concentrated space, making it especially quotable. Quick & intense suit my mood right now.

I found poets through a mix of sources, one big one being a search for queer erotic work in my library system–leading to the discovery of writers like Natalie Diaz and Danez Smith. Sharon Olds has been on my to-read pile for years and I was finally inspired to get into the copy of The Gold Cell that I picked up at a library book sale back in 2017 or so. It was worth the wait.

Overall, the pieces that stick out most to me–and thus the ones that get most quoted–are on sex, spirituality, and sadness. Plus the occasional parody; one of the most recent posts in my “poetry” Tumblr tag is on Beowulf retold by Bertie Wooster, for reasons that really do make sense in context.

Poetry in Cliterature Journal

In an exciting slip into a new genre, I have a poem, “Stiff-Necked in Respect Life Month,” out in Cliterature’s latest issue–Birth Control. 

As you might expect from the title, it’s about a struggle with Catholicism on many fronts (and was actually written in October). It is, for now, the final home of a first line that badly wanted to begin something–a blog post, a flash fiction, and ultimately a poem:

My bedside drawer holds a rosary and a vibrator...