YOU’RE SO FUCKING SEXY AND OTHER POEMS
Lucy Aphramor
PDF of this Piece // PDF of Issue 7 // Table of Contents
Found (fragment)
it is hard to remain faithful
to the firm earth
when the damp-petalled path
opens its throat
and the bluest of flames chooses
to spin spokes between two women
and / yet / but / so
we did it
You’re So Fucking Sexy
I’m sat on the tube
thinking
You’re so fucking sexy
I’m wetter than lube
already
So fucking sexy
I like that
my legs and chest
are gym-stiff
that I’m so hard
and fast
in fact, I’m pretty
blasted
So fucking sexy
flexibility’s next
a firm effort
in that long stretch
untogether
pressing longing
pushing wanting
spinning it all ways
and any which
until I get me back
to you
get to flesh it out
with you
when,
again,
at last
I am
fucking Sexy
So to Speak
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. ―Muriel Rukeyser
There is this body connected to the other and the letting go. Sharing what I know holds something of what’s at stake in the decision to buy a young boy a pink bike with stabilisers on when he’s not even yours. Of course it’s all connected. How it was everybody’s business that week 26 people were murdered at a school in America by a white man with a gun, which is a characteristic of 80% of killers in this sort of incident alongside 100% prevalence of Mr. BS—Male Belief System—as the Politics of Health Group alert us. If you want to be well, agitate for peace, speak, speak of shame as the vector of violence, of silence as the vector for shame. Do not show photos of headless fat people in the name of health or anything else. Let me not cast my lot with stereotypes. Or choke on my own fatuousness but roll up my body—race—class—age—hatred and erotophobia into a bolus and gob it up where it can shine a light and be gentle on myself, while I get to grips with its genesis and consequence which will be painful to witness and recurring like a fur ball. What I’m saying is that it would be a whole heap simpler to write and keep mum keep the real stuff of it hidden in poems of gardening anecdotes, which I dig, or deliciously salacious but ultimately disembodied erotic lyrics, but we know too much now how there are costs raised against all our choices, that silence prides itself with the price on our heads, our hearts, our lives, friendships, desires, destinies, mistakes the terrible way we can learn to live locked in and stitched up with it for years, pickling our bodies’ thirst for knowledge in a mild acid bath of shame and fear and unbelonging—like I did. Everything I know about love I learnt the really hard way. I don’t have my silences sorted yet nor am I familiar enough with my resiliences to be entirely comfortable performing them. Yet, here we are. Believe me, kiddo, this is a long shot. If it means anything anything at all for you to hear this then you know your story counts too. Don’t you. It does so. The split-open world will need the word clitoris in it in a good way. I don’t hesitate in writing only in the reading over when first imagining other than my lover’s eyes censoriousness creeps up to lascivious and I’ll cringe. Slut. Porn. Filth. As if them saying the words made me bad somehow. Now I know better to the letter from the way my tongue picks out the curves in the words flicks along their upright spines pours opulence along their reclaimed bellies belying everything that is untoward launching me launching me forward
The first time I read back labia it hit me pretty much like a shock tactic. Where it took me was to think that I know loads of powerful really good goddamn awful poems about rape and I don’t mean to be gratuitous but it makes a point that I couldn’t name, one with a pleasured labia in it. That’s graphic, telling everything of silence, I thought. The poet Nina Cassian in her book Life Sentences gives us ‘the clitoris in my throat/ vibrating, sensitive, pulsating /exploding in the orgasm of Romania.’ A line that stayed with me all these years. Which means if we’re serious about the word splitting the world open we’ve all got to start talking our bodies more seriously writing, signing, singing, dancing, painting, moving, entering, naming finding a way to say the words for it and also relate. And meanwhile I love you, I love you as you read this, distantly, knowing what gave me the gift of my body speech, babe, and lifted my lips to the page.
Playing Safe
But before we get down dirty and in case
you’ve never personally been there
or seen it acted or for real I thought
I’d better warn you of the facts:
the way I do a flashback is loud as
I can be, indecent with abandon,
wordless but for the obvious.
Nervous? I’ll snap. Screw the
neighbours’ sentiments it’s bedlam.
I’ll shake so bad you won’t get almost close
when I need you, and you need you, to anchor me most
and you are faced with the utmost catastrophe
of love in the face of utter powerlessness
so you’ll have to hold me steady by some
other route, find a way to let me know
this time it’s not forever, that it’s safe to say
I’m coming back to the place
that we created where trust is what I make of it
and pain a pool that I will you to lead me to
so I can stand on its rim
and see myself reflected through its depths
where I turn my back on you and scare
myself with what I want to happen next
where cruelty is spent on violence
and fear, no longer petrified, has come to life
You should know I can hear everything
even when I’m living memory
despite which as you try to reach me I’m likely to fight
like mad like hell for leather
like tooth and nail raw claw
like a terrified child
long gone far out of the body beside herself small
to rail against anything
against everything that threatens at all
to reconnect my head and flesh. I know,
sounds like a gas. You ready for that? Babe. Someone fucked up.
Lucy Aphramor // It is in performing poetry that the topics that interest me professionally in my work as a feminist radical dietitian—including embodiment, justice, trauma, and ways of knowing—find an integrated voice and take shape. For behind the widespread body hatred and disconnect that brings clients with eating troubles to seek out help, lies the scaffold of hierarchical, binary thinking that shores up stereotypes and reinforces the values of patriarchy where non-dominant ways of being are judged, blamed, stripped of power, and belittled. I started performing poetry over 15 years ago and my work now celebrates the power of authenticity and vulnerability in relationship with others, our histories, our bodies. Key to this is an insistence on a formidable physicality that transgressively breaks the silence around women’s erotic experiences and desires, unapologetically putting a queer sex centre-stage.