Incursions into an erotic eco-poetics
Happy pride! My sexuality is apparently trees now :)
sorry for screenshots of poems, but it’s very hard to present them as I want, with the proper line spacing, online. a pdf is accessible as well here, and audio of me reading!
three poems:
*Quote in italics is from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, “The Three Sisters”
Leaves bunch in wet mounds across the squelching path and picking between puddles I’m suctioned into their musty embrace. Dense breath gently undifferentiates from earth worms, soft logs, fallen veins of red — golden — orange — purple — green — strewn about a weave most complex, so losing myself in soaking leaves I’m wrapped, enraptured by bog, attuned by the slick drip-drip of branches softly releasing their sweat we watch each other, forget ourselves, chase through the boughs, as birds squabbling — or fucking — I can never tell the difference: the mud wanting my thighs.
Practice: teasing embodied experiences — out of memory.
Wanting to be fucked by the dirt is distinct from the discomfort of fucking in the dirt. Though when you took me by the cliffs it wasn’t so gritty as good filthy, pushed me up against the looming sand, moved in and out of me while the sky spread massive ballooning like loot above us, so what I’m confusing you and me, or remembering the ongoing if I wanted you or to be you, so what I was you, were fucking me, cliff, face, crumbling, knees, sharp, breath, dust, hold. Who cares who was doing the fucking? Who’s cum all over the chalky white beasts of rock?
No, I’m thinking about the erotics of my child’s play: making passages in the sandbox, great constructions of mud to be filled, plunging, tumbling, with water. Not so much castles as networks of tunnels, telarañas en la tierra. When my pants came home ripped stained nearly eviscerated every evening.
But now I’m wondering about being fucked by the forest itself, and with it comes a dream of intimacy, privacy with the land, yes, being possessed by the land, rather than the fool’s errand of possessing. Could the woods/words claim me, and then make good on it? Consummate with slithering, ladybugs, wrapping, boughs, bogging, moss— what if I went out there and covered myself in it, who would be getting (me) off?
See: sex in the field of power — of course it’s political — it’s always about land.
Is fucking the earth/being fucked by the earth a dumb over-simplification/literalization of dissolving the divide? What about being fucked as the earth. As in, my fucking is already the earth fucking herself, and me being fucked by the earth, even though I’m the fucking operant? Redefining human and land and interconnectedness and our/or the relationship through an erotics of nature writing, an eco-erotics. Fuck me, roots. Come on baby. Let’s go:
I’m not interested in self-righteousness. Holy-
wonky nature poems.
I’m turned on. I turn
on. I want to protect the forest
because I need enough
forest to fuck myself in peace
in. Dissolve, you, into my soft
compounds my an/atomic.
Workshopped in/with found text from “Sex | Gender | Autotheory” workshop with McKenzie Wark, hosted online by Wendy’s Subway, Saturday, April 24, 2021.
Thank you for reading and supporting, always! Much love.
