“The older I get, the more interested I am in bodies and the work of honoring them. The last few years as I’ve worked on my second poetry collection, I’ve challenged myself to honor every part of mine. Each informs the sum and has its own stories worth celebrating.
For this feature, I wanted to not only focus on the body, but, specifically, the intimate body, highlighting some of the ways it becomes (or becomes again) a source of pleasure, identity, and power. I’m grateful for the poems I can spotlight, and I sincerely hope they serve as inspiration and invitations for the reader to revel in the joyous ways their own bodies are what they are and do what they do.”
Blood and Foam
by Angel Leyba
The way the wind
licks my skin
lets me know
the coldest
leaves of winter
have been peeled
from their stem
and I feel sexy
and new in my
white tennis skirt
and sneakers
walking down
the street with
my new lover
I feel sexy when
I spread my legs
open for them
at brunch and they
slip a
hand past
delicate pleats this
same week
I read Coeur de Lion
wearing nothing
but the white
comforter and warm
silence
pouring through
my windows
my lover sleeps
in late I
want
to cradle this
moment
in my arms
like the soft
animal and when
they wake I
tear the animal apart—
muscle
going limp
warm
liquid running
towards the stems
of my hands
my lover takes
me to the mirror
and lifts my skirt
they say
the arrangement
of bruises
and scrapes
on my ass cheek
look like Cy
Twombly’s ‘Leda
and the Swan’
if so
they are artist
in bed I
unlearn
my language I
am not poet
Record of Swallowing Light
By Rivka Clifton
I know exactly what a doctor knows
is protocol.
What betrays the body beneath
a robe curves
like a pastel serpent.
In a photo, I can only hide
*
so much. My doctors now offer
familiarities—I tell
them how much I love injecting
without any details
of my love’s sexual
nature. They applaud.
They say very good. I smile as if
in a photo taken by a near stranger
*
after I’d just blown him
away with my body’s unfurling—
an American flag
licks the air above
a graveyard at night.
Every spotlight aimed up
its rain-glistened shaft
*
like a needle pulled out of a muscle—
Is it blood or oil
that makes a body squirm
and the brain brighten
a room with unending duplications? It’s not so
*
uncommon to document a lover
afterglowing.
After draining, a moment,
silence, the tableau
I love most, like a surgeon hovering
above a patient who just started huffing
an anaesthetic. He is motionless and moving,
*
he tells me exactly what my insides feel
like, he pulls his fingers
from the hole he made
wide with his hand.
My mouth fills with pleasure. I try
to speak. The surgeon assures me.
Every photograph is a record of swallowing
*
light. Some say lover and some say fuck
buddy. I say neither in this story.
I stare ahead, amazed at the thread
my brain unspools—
his body beneath, inside mine.
I opened my mouth, and he obliged
to fill me. It requires nothing
but silence. Silence, too, in the photo
*
he took after—the two of us at the start
of a short hallway, landlord beige.
I fill out a form,
and another. I walk to and from
the clinic. I tell myself this is lifesaving,
I tell my social worker this is
lifesaving, and I believe it.
Who can say that with authority?
*
Who can know what we do
to the body will persevere?
In my dreams, a dark spot. It is hard
to think of how it felt
when I was intact, biologically.
In the surgeon’s office,
my skirt around my ankles my doctor
says amazing. He prods me.
How strange it is
*
to be applauded—the surgeon’s shaven
skull like a beacon beneath the overhead
fluorescence. What is it about men
and this awful lighting?
In their photos, in their
bedrooms—all overhead lighting.
There is a part of me that loves
being pressed into a mattress
and a part of me that loves this part of me
*
and a part that is only embarrassment.
I see his story, and I do not share.
Does he want me to? Does he care?
It repeats for its 24 hour lifespan,
like a mayfly—its curved thorax
a simile too obvious in my mouth.
I want it gone I say or I plan to
*
go all the way to my surgeon who asked about my goals.
He is thrilled.
I would love to put you on
my list, he says, exiting the room.
I text a stranger. I thread this conversation in.
I tell him what drives me,
what excites me. He responds
great. He posts a picture—
his body on a mattress
in an abandoned warehouse, each floor
*
a small labyrinth for our glowing screens
to know. The dark
multiplies, and our jaws make the sound
of copper piping and current until our tongues
emerge from their chattering chrysalides.
What was it like
to be a collection of openings?
My friends, my social worker, my lovers
*
say. You’ve come so far,
and mean well, but
I have gone nowhere
except the grocery store
where I tell a man my name. I say
it’s a girl’s name. I tell him
I am a cooling fan. I purse my lips
and blow a steady stream. It sounds like
*
nothing at all. How picturesque it could be
if decontextualized.
He tells me where I can find
over-the-counter medications for UTIs.
This is after I see the man
who posts pictures of me
to his stories. I told him I can’t fuck
tonight—UTI. He lies
on his back. My head
bobs in a loose time signature—
inside it the memory of a penis
*
as it dripped blood through a pair
of panties. It is affirming to be ruled
by the body, the imperceptible
changes occurring within.
The needle sinks into a muscle—
the fluid releases.
My brain’s feminine structure lights up
in a darkened office. The doctor examining it
waves the generic pharmaceutical
*
name into her prescription
pad. And then I’m barreling
down the city’s corridors,
John next to me, saying yes
it is okay to feel how I do or whatever.
Forget the performance of want.
Each movement staccato. Like a picture’s
rapid progression through my phone’s
screen. In the dark, I’m asking why
to no one again. My shoulders
wiggle through the single word
*
in an image of the image I attempt to be.
I wonder how muted my performance of being
is. What has passed through our mouths
yesterday is not what passes
through today. Every story
is a coming out
story. The sun goes down
the earth’s deepening throat.
The time of photographs
has passed. My shadow is the story
of where my body ends.
Self: Possession (2012)
By Christian J. Collier
After cumming & the return to soundness,
my sweat-sleeked reflection leered back
in a conquest’s bathroom mirror. In the streaked sheath,
my bluish lips parted & the word slut escaped me.
I knew what indulgence shaped me into—
a man reigned & made savage by his lion. Without shame,
I braced my maned back on the late night, loved
what I was, cherished the prowling brute’s rippling brawn.
I was twenty-three & savvied little more than famine.
In my bed, I’d dwelled in orison, begging to be filled,
& while the God I pleaded to watched, another took hold.
His firm paw steering me from home & into
all the pucker & spread Chattanooga’s umbra had to serve.
There are worse sins to be in the den of than gluttony.
To this day, whenever I tilt back my head & yawn,
my breath holds the gamy specter of meat, not regret.
I’m Hosting a Kink Show & the Fire Alarm Goes Off
By Rita Mookerjee
& because the space was born
in 1908 first as a church then a speakeasy
then a factory, the flames burn bright
without meeting the ceiling. I throw open
double doors with golden goat horns on my
head. If you were passing by, you might think
you spotted me presiding over a portal,
unburnt & peeking behind chain link.
Even demons like a breather. The crowd
never leaves the performer, back aglow
like a lightning bug for whom
the flame is simply second nature.
Angel Leyba: Angel (they/them) is a writer from South Bay San Diego living in New York City. They received an MFA in poetry from NYU and are on the Editorial Board of Sundress Publications. You can find their words in Dialogist, Mercury Firs, The B’K, Honey Literary and elsewhere.
Rivka Clifton: Rivka Clifton is the author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press), Wrong Feast (Baobab Press), and Extended Cut (forthcoming Fonograf Editions) as well as the chapbooks: Action (Split/Lip Press), A Feast of Small Proportions (Fork Apple Press), MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). She has work in: Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She lives in Seattle
Christian J. Collier: Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere.
Rita Mookerjee: Rita Mookerjee is a co-founder of Honey Literary, the vice president of the board of Sundress Publications, and a poetry editor of Split Lip Magazine. An assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University, her research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the winner of the 2024 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award for Banana Heart and the author of False Offering (JackLeg Press). Find her poetry in American Poetry Review, CALYX, Copper Nickel, Muzzle, and The Offing.