 Hello and welcome everyone. Thanks for coming to this month's poem gem. I'm John Smolley, a librarian at this library in the General Collections and Humanities Department. While we're waiting maybe for one or two more people to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community. On behalf of the Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatusha Loaning, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatusha have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests we who reside on their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatusha community and by affirming their sovereign rights as First Peoples. I should mention that tonight's program is being filmed for our archives. If you don't wish to be photographed or the back of your head being photographed, you can let me or one of the media crew know. For those who are here for the first time, the Poem Jam series happens every month, the second Thursday of each month, and is curated by the poet Kim Shuck. And you can learn more about our programs by picking up a newsletter from the table over there. There's also flyers. There's also coffee and cookies and pins, the limited 2023 Poem Jam pin. You can also visit our website sfpl.org and the events calendar there. So that ends my announcements for upcoming programs, and so on. I want to turn the microphone over now to Kim Shuck. Please give her a warm welcome. If I'm not mistaken, this is the third event that I've done with Sinister Wisdom and the second recent one. And I've got to say they've been really great every time. And I wanted to also mention specifically, Sinister Wisdom was one of those periodicals of which there were very few that kind of helped me figure some stuff out when I was a young person. And I view it as a really important legacy. And I'm glad it's still going, and it's delightful to see some of the directions that it's going in. I got credit just now for curating this one, which I really kind of didn't. Mostly because I absolutely trust Christie. Not everybody gets to do that on my show. Those of you who are reading know I didn't call you, that it wasn't my email, that I didn't have anything to do with it, but I just thought the idea was so great. And again, I trust Christie. And so another fabulous thing happened that nobody listening to this should do because I usually resist it. But I was sent a run of show, and I was so grateful because this month has been so crazy. And I was like, okay, I was just settling my back side into my chair to put together a run of show and email crops up. And it was like, I don't have to do it. Yay. It's like somebody else did my homework. I'm really grateful. I'm grateful for all of you being here. I cannot wait for this show. I'm going to stop talking very soon. But first, I'm going to introduce Christie Lynn Baloney. Did I get your name right? Good. The giggle was like, uh-oh. Who writes plays about queer triumph and proud outcast with roots in sex work, queer activism in sex ed. She has earned her living for 20 years as a sexy grammarian teacher of bold, free, turned on writers. She lives with her heroic social worker wife in San Francisco. So you should probably come up and intro this. Thanks for being here, everybody. Am I allowed to do this? I'm allowed to do this? Okay. Great. Thank you, Kim, so much for so graciously hosting us and everyone for being here. And this I just want to take in this lesbian sex poetry in the basement of SFPL Vibe. It's like one of my favorite energies in the world and it's happening and I'm standing in the middle of it and I'm super happy about that. And it is really the feeling that inspired this issue of sinister wisdom. I was standing in a room full of sex educators with July West Hale, who is my co-editor on this issue. And July said to me, Christie, have you ever noticed that rooms full of sex educators are also full of queer women? And I said, yes, I have noticed that. And also, have you ever noticed that rooms full of queer women are full of sex educators? And she said, yes, I've noticed that. And I said, July, we should write something about this. And she said, Christie, no, we should edit something about this and get all of our friends to write and do all the writing. And we offered that idea to to Julie Ensar of Sinister Wisdom and she said, yes, do it. And then it became sort of this thing where every time I was at a party full of queer women, I was like, who are the sex educators? And then every time I was in a sex educator space, I was like, who are the queer women here? And pretty soon we had a curated book's worth of cool poetry and essays and there's somebody's dissertation in here and short stories and images about the way that our community gives so much in the world of sex education, even though actually our community tends to be invisible when it comes to our sexuality. And so I really am honored to be honoring that idea and to be able to do it here in the basement of the library. So I'm grateful to July, my co-editor, and to Julie of Sinister Wisdom for giving us this platform and to San Francisco Public Library and to Kim Schuck, especially Kim, Poem Jam. You guys, I started coming to Poem Jam in the summer and I come back as often as I can, and if I miss it, I watch it on the YouTube station or the SFPL YouTube channel because it's so good every time and I have purchased so much poetry because of poetry I've heard in this room. So come back every month. It's so good. Don't miss a single month of this amazing event. I want to thank all of the readers who are here and all of the contributors to Sinister Wisdom number 130 and always, always, always I want to thank my wife who is the seed and soil of everything that I write. Thank you, Helen. And I will give it back to you, Kim, to give us the poets. Thank you. I think I was doing a feature for the San Francisco Community College forum magazine and somebody called this the poetry dungeon. I was like, that actually makes this sound a lot sexier than it is because apart from the great poetry that happens here and what's always a really interesting sort of backdrop projection and that mural. This might as well be a bingo hall in a basement or something, but I love what we do to it. So Mags Yen Chong Matthews identifies as bi and pansexual Taiwanese American dike, pelvic physical therapist, dancer, mother, wife, and educator. She raises her multiracial family while learning to heal generational traumas and free her expression. She contributes health articles to her local paper on unceded Nissanan land in rural California. Mags feels electrified by her first published creative writing and her queer community. Find her work at queerpt.net and the Instagram handle is at queerpt and wellness. Please welcome Mags up to the mic. Thank you. This first are excerpts from my article entitled, I teach sex, free the breath, free the vulva, pelvic bowl, vaginas, anuses, mouths, abdomen, back and hips, my partner rides in orgasmic bliss, vulvas. We've been taught to ignore our feminine wisdom, deny the natural cycles and flows of life each month through the seasons of life, suck in our guts, clench, camouflage, smother, remove, medicate, shame, and pathologize normal female development and emotion. Pathologize aging. Our elders, non-binary, cis, trans, female, held medical, physical, and spiritual wisdom. Take place in the lineage of our ancestors with contraction and relaxation. Release the dams of oppression and let and allow the flow of fluid nutrition, awareness, and joy. Breathe the ocean of air, powerful, strong, without effort. Breathing without cessation from your moist nose all the way through your gut to your pelvic floor, washing the tension out of your vagina through the legs, all the way down to the soles of your feet. My fingers seek out the tangled knots of forgotten threads in your pelvic bowl. I press on entwined vaginal muscles, fibers glued with misuse, and elicit an aching contraction. I press deep on your abdomen and hips under the gluteal muscles. My pressure strums, a ligament of levator ante, arcus tendineus, and obturator internus, folding 270 degrees from pelvic bowl to kissing the neck of the femur. Your perennial body, the centerpiece of your infinity, wrapping around the vagina and anus pulls stiff with tension. As my fingers press to detangle the tension in your fascial web, I empower and encourage you to breathe. Stretch, move, and undulate your spine. Move and loosen from the ends of your body. Stretch through your arms and legs like a morning yawn. I tack down one end at the pelvic floor to allow freedom and movement as you unleash bands of restriction. Reach through each limb and head away from your center like a starfish seeking new ground. Your nervous system sighs with relief as the tension slacks. Electrical impulses tingle with restoration of circulation in your pelvic nerves, and information flows through your fascial connective tissue. This is for Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who founded Daughters of Billets in 1955 and became the first legal same-gender marriage in California in 2008 by Eve Lyons. 55 years is a long time for any relationship to last. 55 years is a lifetime for some. When I see them, I see my future if we're lucky. 55 years ago we developed the hydrogen bomb. Christine Jorgensen had the first transsexual surgery. Hilary and Norge climbed Mount Everest while the Rosenbergs were executed. All these things seem so American yet for 55 years you've remained legally single while battling it out over whose night it is to cook, whose turn it is to clean the cat box. There will always be conflict between wanting to be like everyone else and wanting it to be okay to be different. Still, love is what you want it to be. To quote the tiny, gender-bending, flamboyant little Jehovah's Witness, you fought back at Stonewall before I was born. Your feminism demands there be no wife, even though now there will be two wives. Your feminism demands we redefine marriage rather than squeeze into their definition. Insatiable thirst by Dakota Parks. I have never been able to love just one person. Some may call it greedy, hedonistic, as if my love language is a threat to your presupposed moral system. No, I don't want the old ball and chain. Those antiquated deadbolts locking you down, breeding jealousy as an artificial indicator of love, dragging that rusty chain around your ankle as if toxic monogamy is better than divorce. Honey, I think you need a tetanus shot. Of course, I'm Polly. Polymorphic, meaning, baby, I lack variety. Tonight, I want a woman to whisper poetry between my thighs to practice verses, philosophize, speaking in tongues. Tomorrow, I want to ifuck my mechanic as she is bent over, wrenching on my truck. Just imagine what those hands can do. Sweetheart, I want to sign a mortgage with you, then celebrate at the strip club, watching another woman back that ass up. Your smile infectious, radiating with love in the strangest places. How much joy has been lost to the war waged against love? Policing, who can marry, adopt children, speak openly, share stories with coworkers, hold your partner's hand in public without fear of retaliation to set you straight in a world filled with so much hate. Why wouldn't I want to fill my cup overflowing at the brim, frothing at the lips while we drink our fill of this insatiable thirst for love? The world goes nudist by Melissa Cannon. It's about time, and in time, we won't be shocked or startled by the sizes and shapes of our things. The big and the little, the hard and the soft, the rippled and the wrinkled. No longer the butt of jokes, no more tittering. Our bodies will become our natural accessories, no cover-ups needed. Though given the climate, we'll go in for more sunscreen, we'll wish for more melanin, we won't be a sensation, we'll simply be. Two women holding hands on a beach in Miami before they kiss. A family of four biking to market in Brookline, Massachusetts, only wanting a fig leaf to adorn our figs. So I've been flipping through this again, because I hadn't really looked at who you all were, and I've got to say some of my favorite work is going to be read tonight. I'm delighted. Ray Diamond is a neurodivergent interdisciplinary artist, educator, and nature advocate who studies, co-creates, and meditates with human individuals and communities, as well as micro and macro elements of the spacetime we call nature. I've got to say something about that line, which is just the other day somebody was reading one of my poems and went, you left nowhere for anyone to breathe, and I'm just saying. It's okay. It's a great introduction, and it sounds fascinating, but it was like, that is three lines of writing. They founded, directed, and composed for the Long Tone Choir, 2013 to 2020, wrote and architected the Kentucky Oracle North Atlantic Books, and wrote and illustrated Floating Bones First Matter Press. She is a student and teacher of Qigong and harbors equally deep loves for the transcendent and the absurd. Please welcome Ray to this microphone. Hi. Thank you, Kim. Thank you, Christy. Thank you, everybody for being here. So I'm going to read my poem from this issue here, and then I'll be reading a few poems from my book. So I'm shy, and I fell too shy to read other people's work. I hope that's okay. So anyways, here's my poem. Pilgrimage. Fall in love with your partner's know as the tender fruit of your companion's self-knowledge as a sibilant borderland between your wishes, assumptions, memories, and possibilities beyond your imagination, experience, reckoning that defines the edge of some holy land where your discrete beings transform into the single boundless void that is home to glistering stars. There's a secret trick about that poem that you can read it backwards, not backwards by word, but backwards by line. So if you have a copy, you can do that yourself at home. If you don't have a copy, I know how you can get one. And now for some things that aren't about teaching sex. Sorry. Tangential. So this book is about a time that I was unhoused because there's a housing crisis. And this is the crazy, wide open state that I ended up in. Created a whole book. All right. Blue now. Now, but earlier, the mountains glowed, the mountains pink, pink, the moon close to full, close to this living rock in the relative distances of its ellipse. It's yawning oval. It's tilted, spilt circle, whirl and eye, a temporarily animated fragment stepping over boulders, bold or stand under sky. No. Step. Step, step past dead, thorned branches, unhitching from fabric, stretch ahead to the next wet stone, to the next sea-kissed rock, slosh to the left, twig tangle to the right, rocks drop into beyond, the reaching steps on stones in time, onto sand, sea-soaked, receding, receiving, foot sinking, sinking at each step. And the old lady behind me shouting, arms waving in the air, you did it, you did it, and I did. But there was another stretch of ocean against rock to clamber over under the dimming dome in the darkening air. And I made a way I cannot call mine over that rock reach to, but beyond her elated eyes. It was some act no one witnessed, a nest of experiences lost, that might someday hold an egg or two, a clutch in a roost, a clasp on a boot, and maybe wings will fallow, then follow wind, and arc above and away and ah, ah, away. Your head is opening, opening a copper peony on a stock of neck above a xylophone of heron bones, surrounding your thorax, poplar-like pointing star words, with lethal beaks, birdset, drum bones spinning, thrumming, a clacketing burr around your parallel ur-ribs, your interpulsing heart lungs as a buzz, bunch of bees, bumble dances the dust out from under your diaphragm, sweeps it away, a toxic pollen brings back honey to lube your kukity knees stuck in subservient bend. Yes, sir, yes, sir, no more, now sweet sashaying into flamingo tinted sunrise, you drink into eyes thirsty for new light, that slides like a smack of pink jellyfish down the red river of your throat into a blood-blue kuk-kuk-kartiac ocean of iron brine. Thank you. That was remarkable. I really should at some point get somebody to finance my poetry collection because Kristie was saying it's really easy to end up with a lot of books doing this gig and I'm not sure that I have a sufficient number of bookshelves anymore to start building things out of them. The book for it proceeds at pace. Henry Benison's poems and stories have appeared in, so to speak, Blue Mesa Review, Common Ground Review and others, and in the anthologies Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper, New Tales of Madness, and Golden State 2017 Best New Fiction and Nonfiction from California. A chapbook of poems, Earning Colors, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014. She has a BA in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her poems are rooted in nature and personal experience. Please welcome Henry to the microphone. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? This one is not in the book, but I'm starting out with it. If you wish to find a romantic partner, you might do what I did. Sign up for a weekend retreat at a place called Enchanted Hills. You might seduce the most frozen butch into action when you read this poem at Talent Night. It's called Bodice Ripper Rant. Hidden beneath willens, khakis, rich oars in veins of satin and silk, bobbed with ribbon, garters, corsets, slips, sheer stockings, keeping our awful treacherous bodies bound up like a wedding cake under mounds of sugary frosting, waiting to be mined, taken, discarded, left hanging off a doorknob thrown under the bed wherever we were hunted, made drunk, insane, drugged by shame, or in hysterics of wanting it and nothing mattered. Our bodies, it was how they were shaped adorned by bows to inferral above, below, laces to enlace from leg or pulsing breast, ready for the catch, exposed as oysters, pried from their fancy shells, eaten greedily raw and roughly prey or plunder, driven by need under available romance, every one of us sure we were in control. I should say that when I came out, my first lover was a trans woman who was into SNM, anyway. So this woman started coming over quite a bit, and so this is Friday Night Supper. I bought a miniature crock pot for one which I had to return when she replaced it with a vast and heavier version. It sat big as a hawks nest on my counter waiting for her Friday noontime visit. Together we'd construct a curry of sorts, not too spicy, she said, no salt. Let it be yellow with chunks of chicken or pork, a red bell pepper, no chili, though I added chopped ancho and garlic before she arrived to help with a prep. Carrots, turnip, onion, a beet, broccoli, dino kale, rice or barley, three cups of broth, black pepper, paprika, ginger, spoons of yellow curry. We filled up the pot, put the lid on, set it at low and laid down on our new bed to catch up with the past days and nights of our alternate lives with other people. Then it was a walk somewhere nearby and a return to the fragrant curry stew greeting us at the door with its promise. Yes, here love holds you and embrace that feeds the heart, low sodium, high nutrition, aerobically enhancing the inner strength of your life force that both of you may swoop into this Sabbath meal bestowed by Providence, Providence and the wonders of electric outlets. This is full moon night, which we didn't notice so deep are we in each other, these trellis weekends of vining Jasmine weaving into a new spring, an abundance of white blossoms, this immersion in love, love making, richly different from former attempts, truer, more prized and us now unburdened, a patchwork of scraps, how we kept it together, a rip out of seams, rethread of needle, fashioning our bodies to a purer form of love and a finer form of lust. At which point I thought I should warn my lover of what I was really like. Wanderer in a weed patch, beware of that charmer you've fallen for, no pale blue love and a mist, more a mix of vinegar and salt from the seas of Babylon, screwing your path with nettles and snake root, warm wood, mugwort, the delirium of love lies bleeding crankcase oils of her inheritance. What patch of tarweed and beggar ticks will catch you when you pitch so insistently into her arms dependent as you are on the logic of lust, what risk to come forth like the goddess from her retreat to the underworld and hold that body close to yours for one long moment a lasting crush and firefall rendered into the coins of her kingdom. And then we flew to Kauai. And this is called foreplay, Papu Beach. The first streak of pink broke through the window, cleaving sleep to the floor. Time, I said to the body beside me, unmoving. We woke, or anyway, I was up ready for coffee. When's the sunrise? Maybe 45 minutes, I said. The clock said 543. Star still out, the belt of Orion, a planet, Saturn or Jupiter. I made his coffee, mine black. Here's decaf with cream, I said. We watched from our balcony as stars gave way in those few seconds, Orion of faded giant, the sea swelling and falling, breeze from the north, palms on their skinny, lanky trunks holding up those dark fans, each splayed leaflet defined against a faint sky. Your arms warm around my waist as we stood the waves of constant 615, small bursts aglow as the sun breached one cloud, faced another. Like an orgasm, I said, you feel it coming, fading, pulsing, or more like foreplay, all that anticipation waiting for the buildup and maybe it happens or only lingers as dreamy ecstatic satisfaction or by charge of body to body. We lingered on the balcony, coffee cups empty, watching our world regain its color, palm fronds becoming green, polished by last night's rain, the sea taking on all that reflected light, like an audience yelling bravo, I said, though now the body was back in bed. 647, large cloud wafts by full of pink light, framed in gray against the pure blue sky, and the palms, their fronds lifting themselves up, swept by persistent wind and bright with heat. So I'm going to end with another poem that's not in the journal and it's called Forgetting a Fear of Hunger. My Amazon is all butch, tough, also trembling, vulnerable, yes, never really sure she's safe when out in the world unless it's the Castro or P-town, except with me. I provide cover, femme as bodyguard. A million words of warning before the day finally arrived when she allowed me to touch the places underneath her underwear. But once that's breached, more words poured forth, eroding boundaries, melting glaciers of foreboding, a tsunami of climate change, lashed by winds of unquenchable passion, a whole set of novels as it were to chase the mysteries of sex like Nancy Drew and her dashing convertible. The heated freeways of love followed by hours of discussion, how to fit into a lesbian paradigm of rules that demanded sex act one be followed by relationship act two. Could we rewrite that fantasy into a kind of fairytale where the princess and the prince meet nightly? The prince disappears at sunrise, not a vampire story, or is it, where each shares their hunger for the other? Such as lichens in a melding of kingdoms, a prince of algae, princess of fungi, may be joined by count bacterium, a two or threesome in various combos dividing their spoils as pirates do, pushing out on their own trajectories in a kaleidoscopic journey to the ends of earth, a ball that has no ends as Einstein knew, energy never lost, free to act out all sorts of behaviors like popcorn, where there's always a few unpopped kernels refusing to give in to fate, but the rest puffed up and ready to feed the soul of the whole world with crunchy, salty, buttery love which forgets in its satiety the fear of hunger. Thank you so much. That was awesome. Juno Rosenhaus is a photo artist exploring themes of self-perception, feminist identities, family drama, and queer communities as informed by her experiences as a dyke-identified social justice activist. In 2020, Juno launched the Dyke Plus Art House, a community-driven home and feminist collective for dyke and queer artists, and the physical manifestation of her art practice. An East Coast dyke of West Coast experience, Juno lives and works on Lenape Nationland, colonialy known as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Please welcome Juno. My name is Juno and I'm a dyke. Thank you. How's that? Good? All right. Hey everybody. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about this project. So the back cover of this issue is my image from a series called I Will Not Be Pretty for You, Volva's Queered. This issue is a lot of joy about sex, a lot of hot things, a lot of really just exciting feelings and putting it out there, and I've loved everything that I've read. Volva's Queered was also about finding joy, but a lot of it was about acknowledging that as I thought, well, there's no issues around sexuality and body parts in the queer community. Silly. I'm so silly. But there is and there because all of us have mothers or lovers who have said things that have stayed with us for a really long time. Maybe fucked up your sex lives, maybe fucked up some other things. And so what I wanted to do with this project is collaborate with people in the queer community to reimagine their volvas and work on turning what they would like to do, what they would like to see to kind of take back a little power from maybe some things they've been told in the past about their genitalia. So I'm going to read a little bit from the description because I wrote it, it's pretty good. And it explains the project a little. So I will not be pretty for you. Volva's Queered. It's a gender inclusive photo project which asks participants about the vision they have of their volva and produces an artistic collaboration as an answer. Volva is defined as external genitalia of many females, males, and intersex people. Social assumptions about what volvas should look like can lead to shame, confusion, psychological distress, and many, many unnecessary surgeries. The images and I will not be pretty for you convey Volva's reimagined Volva's Queered. So this project involved me going to five different areas of this country and plus Berlin. So San Francisco Bay Area, I always have to count San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Berlin. I feel like I missed one but I didn't. So I went to all these places, put a call out, and got actually not that many. Maybe I've taken maybe 18 to 20 photo sessions with folks who volunteered and obviously, and a lot of people said, you know, this is the thing that I've been looking for. I've had so many thoughts about this. It has consumed me what someone said way back when and I've always wanted to do it, kind of take this next step and reinvent. Right? So this is what it allowed people to do. And that's about it about the project, but that's just the bigger picture of what this, this photo was taken in Berlin. It's the only one that I did with partners. And it was really fun. So really, yeah, it was really, really fun. And I'm so freaking proud that it is on the back cover of this issue. So thank you. I'm going to read Lesbian Time Traveling by Dakota Parks. Apparently she's a favorite. Yeah. All right. I dreamt we had a threesome, me, you and the universe. Our third, shapeshifting bodies in orbit, traversing familiar yet foreign landscapes, tracing constellations down thighs, charting galaxies with the tip of a tongue, wrapping around one another, entangling our atoms, disappearing in the sheets like falling through a wormhole, accidentally stumbling into the cosmos where time slows, stops, warp speeds, repeats. Limbs melt into each other, defy gravity, collide rhythmically like an asteroid, belt, fingers, telescoping, searching, circling, fine tuning their calibration again and again and again. On this celestial journey of infinite pleasure until finally the pressure peaks and plummets, burning hot, skin glistening in starlight, back arching, legs earthquakeing, nails clawing sheets, riding the shockwave like a supernova explosion, the force so strong she rips apart, space and time with a moan. I really do hope everyone's having as much fun as I am. You know what I did is that I pulled the thing out. Hang on. I got distracted. It is distracting. It is distracting. Riley Hurst is a poet, philosopher, foodie and activist. Riley has been published in Bitch Goddess, the advocate HIV plus magazine, image outright volume seven and volume eight and the Mojus, 2019 and 2020. Riley has been featured at AXM gallery, Lumiere photo, writers and books, Rochester spoken word and just poets and co-created a collaboration of dance, music and poetry somewhere in between as part of Rochester's fringe festival. Riley also writes articles and is the food columnist for the empty closet, the second longest running LGBTQ magazine in the country. In Riley's spare time, Riley studies policies, sketches and prior to the pandemic got out like a lot. Please welcome Riley to the mic. Of course as things stand I'm behind this tall one. So it seems only appropriate. I'm going to say I'm very lucky to be here today and I'm very glad to be. July who is the co-editor is one of my good friends and who I love very much and I'm excited to have met Christy this time. I really love where you came from on that. I've known lesbians teach sex to everyone besides being the backbone of about every useful movement I've seen because even I have taught gay men how to orgasm more than once. There's something really odd about that. I also just want to honor what you said about the vulva and about body parts and lesbians. Our fine featured artist here which is just that patriarchy is like palm olive. We're all soaking in it all the time, right? I was going to read July's piece first but I recognize that I almost always and I will admit this blush during my poem. So I'm going to read the poem, the first poem that's in this book for me and then we'll read some other things that are in here as well. This is called explicit. It's been nicknamed the strap on poem. I find that several of my poems end up having nicknames from my friends who call it something else completely than whatever I've titled them. So this is one of those. On the drive over here all she did is touch my dick, stroke my hardness through the jeans. We get to the show, standing in line at the coat check. She rubbed her ass up against me three times. We duck into the back room. She kneels and undoes my fly with her teeth. She wraps her mouth around my inches, starts to suck and then bite. I stop her. I'm worried about the look later for other girls in times. We both know I'll pull her up that I can't get off without getting in. I start to kiss her, absently, hungrily. My mouth a bit askew, fondle her nipples through her dress. Then my hand slides under the hem of her short dress and starts to pull down her panties. She moans and her leg starts to crawl on me. My other hand travels from the small of her back to her beautifully curved cheek. I pull up her dress from there and pull down the rest of her panties. I suddenly crouch, spread her pussy, lick then suck her whole clit in my mouth, while my fingers delve inside her to see how ready, how big she can take. She's already so wet before my tongue actually tastes her. I use that wetness to spread on my cock, insert slowly, first just gliding in her inch or two, rubbing up against her spot, and heave all of it slowly up inside her, my arms coming up beside her shoulder blades, holding her shoulders as I start this ride. I'm aware of her similarly timed rhythm here and feel her as she comes a few seconds before me, still tremoring as I get off on an appendage accessory with no blood pumping through except my will and hips. I know we're supposed to be building a bridge, but this is my own journey, alone in the ride, experience. I'm incredibly grateful for it. It's hard enough to find someone who wants this so often with such matching chemistry, but building a relationship, that's not what this sex is. I have my handcuffs on me, but there's no place to tie them to. They'll have to wait for when there's someone's bike to borrow. When we do have the bike, later on the back of a Harley, or is it a rebel? The girl's bike because the center of gravity is right. I cuff her to the handlebars, put the pedals for riders down, lift her legs to the sky and pull all my forward motion, thrilling at light speed through her, and I wonder again when I'm gonna leave her what this ride is coming to as the soft familiar stranger succumbs to my desires and her own at night in a city under street lamps, a road map to each other's bodies, but not each other's minds, not each other's lives. I let the scene fade, open my eyes, and think finally of you, wondering what might have been. Sex may be with less cardiovascular fitness, but I suspect with more laughter and lingering, soft bedrooms and quiet daylight, broken in with spoken shared memories from the day or a month ago, friends' names on lips with awkward looks or thoughts, and I think desire is a small piece of the puzzle of our lives to be writ so large. I trade a little heat for more warmth and your soft green stare, and I'm gonna read a little piece from July because it seems very appropriate and very much in my same mind, and I'll probably end with a poem that's got some similarities to some of what you wrote in here, and this is this is definitely not a poem, this is a prose piece. It was a place that used to have unlimited mimosas and a very long bathroom line, in other words, both a terrible idea and an invitation for queer hookups. It was a place, but maybe one of the last in Oakland, where a body could get an eight-dollar brunch with shit in your pants, strong coffee, chiquillas, thick bacon, and beignets, and because of that, the line went around the block, and maybe because of that, it doesn't exist anymore. But for a while, I went there regularly. I was working a $9 an hour ESL teaching job, going through a very bad breakup, and in my goal-oriented manner, making a point of dating widely and wildly, cheap brunch fit all of those lifestyle parameters. The best day to go was Sunday, but you really had to commit to both the day drinking and the weight. There are things that I just can't hack anymore in my 30s. Back then, however, I just get bored, find a babe, go to the bathroom, hoist my skirt up. It was one of those bandage things, and only really an idea of fabric. Nicole had one hand on my hips, pushing me into the bathroom mirror, where I could see us reflected in a reduction of our relationship. All of the sex with none of the processing, which was my pre-therapy preferred dynamic. Her other hand, to my absolute delight, was covering my mouth so I wouldn't cry out. We were tipsy, but champagne tipsy, and everything was idea thin. The bubbles at the back of our throats, the conversation we'd some only had the night before about not fucking at brunch, and the idea that our friends just straight up wouldn't notice that we weren't hanging out next to them eating our marvelous assortment of low ball gourmet breakfast foods. Nicole was an Aries and terrible for me, but she knew exactly how to fuck me in a bathroom, and that's all I cared about. In fact, that's what I cared about for most of my frantically 20s. Emotional connection was all well and good, but that bathroom sex, though? I suppose I should be grateful for the moment a ham-fisted butch got sick of waiting and busted through the door to the stall, stopping Nicole and I both immediately in the middle of what we were doing, which was, at that moment, a complicated position involving my foot on the soap dispenser. Grateful, because without the secret voyeurism of the bathroom, I wouldn't have been sleeping with this person who was such a terrible idea. The dispenser was slowly dripping bubblegum pink soap onto the counter like an 80s B horror film. You dirty dogs, the butch screamed gleefully, which attracted the attention of the owner and got us 86 so quickly we barely had time to pull our clothes back on. The sun had been bright, too bright, like an interrogation room. When Nicole asked me if I'd like to go back to her house, I shrugged, mumbled something about feeding my cat, and walked home by myself. Being outside of the claustrophobia-inducing space of the bathroom made me feel too vulnerable, too much like I got caught doing something, though I wasn't quite sure well. I am well within my right to find comfort in bathroom sex. It's a birthright of queer people everywhere. Not only is there something thrilling about the exhibitionism, the dirty punk feel of filthy grout and dicks drawn in sharpie, then not even bothering to hide two sets of shoes, there's also an honest to God lineage of homos hooking up in toilet stalls. I'm going to go ahead and read the very end of this. I'm going to read you the very end of that same piece. I didn't really ever go out with Nicole again after being busted in our mid-bathroom revelry. I kept her in a brutal limbo for a cruel amount of time while I figured out if I was still heartbroken over my last girlfriend or not. I was, and then I got attacked by her cat once while house sitting, and that seemed as good a reason as any to end things. Something to point to. Not, I'm figuring things out. I'm sorry. I'm messy right now, but rather, your cat sunk his teeth into my arm and I'll have the scars for years, which is terrible because I love cats. Everyone knows that talking about cats is code speak for queers, anyway, but that's a whole separate article. And I'm laughing because I also am going to read something from Dakota Parks and then I'll finish with something else of mine. Depending on how much time we have, I might even go for two. How are we doing? Okay. Okay, you got it. Love, wrong answers only. Love is a warm, consensual hug on a first date and never speaking to them again. Love is an institutionalized system of reciprocal obligations to force one to partake in hallmark holidays and patrimonial celebrations. Love is a dying red flower in a vase full of sugar and vinegar, simple solution. Love is the assertion that the heart symbol originates from the crude representation of a woman's ass coined for capitalism. Love is the chemical compound of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, dancing together in your head to ensure biological reproduction. Love is making everything a metaphor for sex. Love is buying a 48 count pack of batteries from Sam's Club for your twice a day vibrator and deleting Tinder into liberation. Love is smoking marijuana for the first time and feeling your heartbeat through your colliderous. Love is an eight inch dildo suction cup to the door of your apartment and a breakup letter from your girlfriend on the doormat. Love is the unwritten rule that when all lesbian relationships end, must throw away the sex toys. Love is a broken finger on your dominant hand and googling how to be an ambidextrous lesbian. Love is canceling your Sunday plans to stay in bed and watch the L-word reruns. Love is a fully stocked condom machine in the public library and a top-brows category, sexy hot milf librarians on Pornhub. Love is an afro-pubic hair, wool socks of leg hair and razors thrown in the trash. Love is a dog from hell, but that bitch wants her drill back and maybe an orgasm just once. So this one is one of the ones I have from Image Outright and it's called Not Very, Read It All, Catholic. I've spent too long as a nun, N-O-N-E, gotten used to the habit of sleeping alone, of just saying no. You make me want to give up my religious ways to slowly undress you, mouth my repentance along the curve of your neck and the hollow of your throat, to give communion from my lips after your cup has filled, to surrender to the girl lovering you who wants me vulnerable and prostrate before you, to say our prayers, gasping them as names torn from our throats and cries of ecstatic depossession and after at breakfast, communing with Sunday sausage gravy, to lightly stroke and feel again a desire and gently to slip through a door into a small room, a rest stop, vestibule, to make prayers again at a public altar. Slipping my offering into you as we both repeat our rose-shaped prayers in a public stall, finding absolution on a Sunday for confessions of the flesh that are really our forms of worship and prayer. And this one is not so sexy, but it's still pretty. Well, it's good. Anyway, it's called I Will Never Be The Same and I will say this is another one of the ones where my friends have another name for it. They call it the Rockwater Palm. So, in a lifetime long ago, but not so long ago that I cannot remember, I married a river. I was a large young stone then, proud, hard, not worn or carved as you see me now. The stream knew how to love me, unknowable and impermanent. Ours was a wedding not built to last, but left its traces on each. She found her nature where she pushed against me, but her gift was greater. Eyes a rock stood and she flowed in all the cracks where I didn't know I was broken. And I now leak healing waters from all those fissures that she left behind. The knowledge of how the water was always entwined with the rock, that my love flows and fills you now. Lotuses grow all around where I stand, as a legacy left behind of what was so freely given and flowing. You can get blood from a stone. Really, it's the very best guide. Well, that was awesome. Thank you, Christie. Thank you, Library, in particular, John, Mike, Kenny, for making sure that this everything functioned properly. I don't know how many of you have read and bad bars I have. I love the mics here. They don't smell of beer and they function. Which is always a plus. Thank you, Mags. Thank you, Ray. Thank you, Henry. Thank you, Juno. Thank you, Riley, for all the great words. I think I'm destined to buy some more books. Buying books is a really good idea. There might be books. You never know. Thank you all for being here. Give yourselves a hand.