Once By Fire
Once I loved a man who loved canes. This was not the first thing I knew about him, or the second, or the third. For many months, he masqueraded like a lover of other things: of serial compositions, old Penguin book covers, Bauhaus furniture and Belgian white beer. He showed me what he thought I […]
On Kissing
First, I’d like to acknowledge my blatant thievery. The title is a shameless appropriation from Derrida’s book on Jean Luc Nancy: On Touching. It’s a damn difficult read and I’ve never made it all the way through. It’s one of those texts that, unless you’re doing a dissertation on Nancy or Derrida, probably works best […]
Problematic POVs
I’ve been reading through the submissions for the Under The Skin antho and doing some writing myself, and pondering the issue of problematic POVS. There are some pretty hard and fast rules about POV, but there are a lot of grey areas where the way forward is not quite clear. Literary fiction is typically (but […]
Eversharp
The steel lives on the tip of my tongue. A strange synesthesia that bridges outer and inner worlds. Its edge hums in my veins. The cut it will make, the blood it will spill, the pain it will cause all force my heart up into my throat until my pulse deafens me and my mouth […]
Eating Invisible Pasts: For Eliot and Baudelaire
I stroke my cock to the jagged rhythm of the syllables, their meaning smeared to indecipherable loss. I luxuriate in the stagnant waters of a nostalgia for something that never was. Its bitterness turned with age to cloying aphrodisiac, its depths to languid quicksand. The paralyzing elixir of love. Fixed in the contemplation of a […]
Kiss of Fire
Blair had never kissed anyone, ever. And, of course, no one had ever kissed him. That seems obvious, but when people kiss, it’s never really clear who is doing the kissing and who is being kissed once their lips meet. I met him at a craft fair in Camden. He watched me weld the edges […]
The Tender Rage of Flesh
There is some nameless valve that will not shut out the knowing of you. In the matrix of my thoughts, some muscle the anatomists missed, forever bruised to tenderness. Affection’s velvet petals curl tight around a wounded corona of inevitable loss. Love exists in the shadow of that awful, ephemeral truth: you and I and […]
Fear, Love and Loss: Izzy’s Questions
I don’t usually go in for blog memes, but Isabella E. Marks posed a great one on her blog, originating with this quote: “Everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.” H. Jackson Brown Jr. So, her challenge was: What are you afraid of? What do you love? What have […]
Best Men’s Erotica: Interview With the Editors
Will Crimson and Raziel Moore (who both post on the blog Erotic Writer) are the editors for Burning Book Press’ upcoming anthology, Best Men’s Erotica. I invited them to answer some questions on the specific of men’s erotica, and what makes it different from erotica for women. What do you think distinguishes erotica written for […]
Gender and Sexual Orientation: Authoritarian Desires to Label
I recently got caught up in a discussion on twitter with the charming Louise Sorensen over this article: “What Science Knows About Homosexuality.” As much as I applaud any survey of scientific research on a subject, I have to say that there is an undercurrent of assumption in a lot of the scientific literature that […]