“By Steam or By Sail”: a prose poem
My prose poem about being bisexual and in lust (with people of all genders and with words, particularly boat metaphors), and a bit of kink if you want to read into my cable metaphors, is up at Litro Magazine as their Friday Flash!
You are strung with cables humming in high winds, singing like the veins. You are laid with circuits of nerves in electric wires, sophisticated and swift. You make a sail with your broad back, a canvas of your bending, billowing body.
Hello to the steam of your breath. Thank you, when you guide me home with your hair like smoke. Welcome, when you find your way as I stoke the furnace within you.
Vapour dissipates into the atmosphere, not before it curls our hair and glistens on our skin. Hot enough to scald…
Cables gone salty with ocean breeze, with sweat, hold sails taut against the bodies of air that push into them. Seemingly so thin, so strained, but holding. Knots grow tighter as they dry. Perhaps it’s dangerous. Perhaps we shouldn’t let them ever get dry. Let’s not.
https://www.litromagazine.com/usa/2022/02/by-sail-and-by-steam/
The title comes from French slang for bisexual, “à voile et à vapeu,” or “to work by steam or by sail.” I first discovered that charming phrase when I read Carole Maso’s Aureole, a sort of collection of erotic prose poetry (perhaps? It’s a real genre-buster. The subtitle is “An Erotic Sequence” if that clarifies). I was inspired to try my own hand at the craft Maso makes look so effortless…so breathlessly effortless.
It was not effortless, but it left me a bit breathless and steamed up, for what it’s worth.
You can read the full piece here.