I used to blog at Echoes
There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing you are not being
heard noticed only
by others not heard
for the same reason.The flavor of midnight fruit tongue
calling your body through dark light
piercing the allure of safety
ripping the glitter of silence
around you
dazzle me with color
And perhaps I won’t notice
till after you’re gone
your hot grain smell tattooed
into each new poem resonant
beyond escape I am listening
in that fine space
between desire and always
the grave stillness
before choice.As my tongue unravels
in what pitch
will the scream hang unsung
or shiver like lace on the borders
of never recording
which dreams heal which
dream can kill
stabbing a man and burning his body
for cover being caught
making love to a woman
I do not know.
Audre Lorde is one of my heroes, one of the first real people I’d ever deeply admired. I found her when I was just discovering Colette and still thought bisexuality was something exclusive to pornography.
At sixteen, I was that girl who read poetry, classic and classical literature, science-fiction and comic books. That weird chubby girl. For all that I read compulsively, I had never come across anything that seemed to speak to me—the silent me, the excruciatingly self-conscious and perpetually quaking me, that I was convinced I hid so well.
At that age, I was questioning my sexuality—a term I dislike. Maybe because it calls to mind that solitary journey, where it seemed as if I only learned something new about myself when I stumbled and fell over it, face first. Maybe because I wasn’t truly questioning, but desperately groping for an answer to a question I didn’t know how to frame in any meaningful way. Why can’t I be normal? didn’t present any helpful subjects I could search for in the card catalog. (Yeah, back then. It really wasn’t that long ago.) I wondered if I was a lesbian, but I couldn’t make that fit with my intensely deep fascination with both boys and girls. I wondered if I was going through the phase that I’d been told about in sex ed: curiosity about the same sex is normal; it doesn’t mean you’re gay. But even then I suspected my interest wouldn’t be a passing event.
The prologue from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered—to leave and to be left—to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving. I would like to drive forward and at other times to rest or be driven. When I sit and play in the waters of my bath I love to feel the deep inside parts of me, sliding and folded and tender and deep. Other times I like fantasize the core of it, my pearl, a protruding part of me, hard and sensitive and vulnerable in a different way.
I have felt the age-old triangle of mother father and child, with the “I” at its eternal core, elongate and flatten out into the elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter, with the “I” moving back and forth flowing in either or both directions as needed.
Woman forever. My body, a living representation of other life older longer wiser. The mountains and valleys, trees, rocks. Sand and flowers and water and stone. Made in earth.
Finding one of Lorde’s poems in an anthology, a stirring glimpse of eroticism, aroused me in ways beyond the sexual. It validated the maelstrom of desire that had been confounding me since I was twelve years old, and it ameliorated a profound sense of alienation. As I grew older, her writing became more and more meaningful and relevant to my life. From her, I gained one of the tenets I live by today: Your silence will not protect you.
If any writer has contributed to the person I am today, it’s Audre Lorde.
