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Sexuality
Poetry
Lilies At Midnight
The lilies leaning from their vase, opening / their legs, their arms, even their splitting pale-pink torsos / over the kitchen table — / its clutter of bills and crumbs.
February 2012Sy Safransky’s Notebook
January 2012
It took twice as long as I thought it would, and it’s only half as good as I’d hoped, but the first draft of my book is finished. This morning our cat Zooey walked across my desk and vomited on the manuscript. My first bad review.
January 2012Fiction
I Just Died
It’s summer, and I’m hearing my landlady’s pets more than I’d like to. She lives upstairs and told me when I moved in that her animals were quiet. Clearly I was a fool to believe her.
January 2012
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Country Where You Once Lived
It starts when you’re thirteen, and those tight shorts make your crotch wet when you ride your bike. You like these shorts, the way they make you feel this new way: sexy. You fall asleep at night thinking about sex. You listen to songs that encourage you to think about sex, and you discover you can even think about it at church and in the classroom without anyone knowing, if you keep a certain demeanor and cross your legs a certain way.
January 2012
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Hold Everything Lightly And Nothing Will Hurt Us
I’m driving north on I-95. The asphalt rushes beneath my tires, and when the speedometer hits eighty, the steering wheel vibrates in my hands, this little sedan protesting. The trees along the interstate burn orange and gold, and the northern half of the East Coast stretches ahead of me. I’m driving north on I-95 in October, which means I feel like someone is dying.
January 2012
The Dog-Eared Pageexcerpted from
excerpted from
Women In Love
He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free.
July 2011Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
You Are Not Pretty
On the drive back to the dorm I think more about her comment. Pretty. Even the word sounds delicate, the tongue fluttering against the roof of the mouth like a trapped butterfly when it’s spoken. Alone in my room I take a look at myself in the mirror. I could almost be pretty — I am tall and long limbed, with blond hair and blue eyes — but I’m not.
June 2011
Poetry
Love Shack
The only room in the house we can heat properly becomes the only room where I’ll let you undress me.
March 2011Fiction
The Way She Walks
There are those who like to look for girls in the subways. Once I knew a girl, a Barcelonian, who was good at it. Prodigiously good. Oh, that Spanish swagger. She liked very much the challenge, she said. It is so like being on the stage, she said.
March 2011
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