My skin is
hungry flutter in
my chest
aching for touch
smooth my hands over
thighs
hips
neck
cheek
fingers trace the line
of lip and collarbone craving
hot shower
hot chocolate
burn my tongue on the absence
of a lover’s mouth
lonely body
longing for all that
heat
enough
to make me
shiver
Category: writing
Hi, folks!
So, today, I’m taking part in a blog tour promoting a new erotica anthology – Show Yourself to Me – from author Xan West (You can find the whole tour at this link, yesterday’s stop can be found here, and tomorrows – which involves a time-difference – can be found here. The tour itself includes a number of reviews, but you can also find – and add – reviews at Good Reads and Amazon). I jumped at the chance to read a slew of stories from an author I respect and admire, as well as the opportunity to ask some writerly questions about the nuts, bolts, and decisions involved in writing an anthology like this.
Show Yourself To Me – Cover Art
Close-up of a hand, holding a chain-leash, thumb brushing the lips of the person on the other end of the leash.
Before we get to the interview, here’s the blurb about the book itself:
In Show Yourself to Me: Queer Kink Erotica, Xan West introduces us to pretty boys and nervous boys, vulnerable tops and dominant sadists, good girls and fierce girls and scared little girls, mean Daddies and loving Daddies and Daddies that are terrifying in delicious ways.
Submissive queers go to alleys to suck cock, get bent over the bathroom sink by a handsome stranger, choose to face their fears, have their Daddy orchestrate a gang bang in the park, and get their dream gender-play scene—tied to a sling in an accessible dungeon.
Dominants find hope and take risks, fall hard and push edges, get fucked and devour the fear and tears that their sadist hearts desire.
Within these 24 stories, you will meet queers who build community together, who are careful about how they play with power, who care deeply about consent. You will meet trans and genderqueer folks who are hot for each other, who mentor each other, who do the kind of gender play that is only possible with other trans and genderqueer folks.
This is Show Yourself to Me. Get ready for a very wild ride.
And now, on with the interview! 😀
~*~
1) Show Yourself to Me opens with a story that, fundamentally, is about belonging. Can you talk to me about that, and why you chose to open your anthology with this piece?
“Missing Daddy” sets the mood of the book in so many ways, and belonging is absolutely one of them. For me, as a queer writer who centers my fantasies and desires in my work, belonging is such a central aspect of that, of my queerness, of my kink, of my politic. Being connected, not just in the context of a romantic couple apart from the world, but being in the world, belonging to community and family, belonging to self, as well as being claimed and claiming in the context of D/s. They balance and match each other, all those belongings. Especially for a story that begins by speaking openly about abuse in the context of kink, and the legacy of that in kink life and community, it is so important to center this story of longing and nostalgia in a deep memory of belonging and care in the context of BDSM. This story wants the reader to hold all of that reality in queer kink life: abuse of power and also care with power, legacies of abuse that last long beyond abusive relationships, and legacies of leather that feel whole and beautiful that also come with us, belonging to self, giving self to a partner, belonging in community and family.
2) Pieces like “My Pretty Boy”, “The Tender, Sweet, Young Thing”, and “How He Likes It” touch on how it can be easier to accept cruelty than gentleness. Can you talk about that for a bit?
I’ve had a lifetime of experiencing sensory input in ways that didn’t match how people thought I should be experiencing it, how it was “supposed” to feel. It took me a long time to come to terms with and accept that reality, which has shaped so much of my daily life, especially play and sex. The simple truth is that people are different, and they experience sensations differently. Something that is intolerable for me might be pleasurable or neutral for you. Kink really helped me hold that reality, because although there were cultural expectations about how people would experience sensations, I kept finding, as a top, that the folks I played with would experience them so very differently from each other.
This theme in my work, of light touch and gentleness feeling close to or actually intolerable, where sharp, firm or intense touch, and pain in particular, feel welcome and desired, is my attempt to center and validate an experience that is so rarely acknowledged, even in kink life. It is an experience that often resonates for stone-identified folks, and that is definitely part of my motivation as well, to write stories where stone folks can see themselves reflected without judgment or pathologization, as those stories are incredibly rare.
It’s also a layered thing, one that gives opportunities for internal struggle within a scene, and pathways for sadism. In “My Pretty Boy,” they consensually play with the fact that Rickie hates gentleness. This created a wonderful way to shift perspective on what cruelty and sadism can look like, and illustrate that sometimes gentleness can be very cruel indeed.
3) This is a collection of your erotic writing, some of-which is forthcoming (I think… like the excerpt from Shocking Violet), and some of-which has been published elsewhere. A lot of them run to what I think of, accurately or not, as “standard anthology length”, but some are longer and some are much, much shorter (“This Boy”). I’m wondering how many of these pieces were written for specific calls (“Facing the Dark” seems like a likely example), how many just turned up in your head demanding to be written down, how many were born out of personal explorations or writing practice? (Yes, this is essentially a “where do you get your ideas” question).
You got it right, close to half of these stories were written for specific calls (including some of the shorter ones, for flash fiction collections). For a number of years, writing to a specific market was part of what drove my writing process. “Facing the Dark” was written because an editor asked me to write something for a gay fireman anthology. “Missing Daddy” was for a bear call, “Ready” for a gay motorcycle collection, “Falling for Essex” for a college boys call, “My Will” for a gay time travel anthology. “Please” was written as an exercise in writing to a tight editorial preference—for Violet Blue’s Best Women’s Erotica series. “The Tale of Jan and Tam” was written for a fairy tale retellings call.
When I’m contemplating writing for a call, or am solicited by an editor for a specific kind of story, I sit with it for a while, do some research if needed, see what wants to stick. I often go through a few ideas before I land on one that works for the call and feels doable to me. I’m especially looking for a spark, a beginning, a strong voice, or a moment in the story that I find so compelling I feel like I need to write it. My notebooks are filled with potential ideas like this, and there are some I will bring out years later, and try to write them.
The other times, I often find a spark in something else. “The Tender Sweet Young Thing” was sparked by a conversation I had at a regular queer gathering I go to. “Compersion” was sparked partly by a class I went to on the subject, that felt like it completely left out so much of my own experiences of compersion. “Nervous Boy” was written in response to a craigslist ad I saw, and answered, though I never got a response. I’ve also written fantasies and dreams that kept returning demanding to be told. I’ve written pieces for lovers, and potential lovers. I’ve written stories in response to scenes I’ve watched.
Often, it’s a mesh of things that drive my writing; the spark or the voice or the lines that come into my mind are just the beginning. There are often experiences and ideas I want to capture, and things I want to talk about in my stories. I’m fairly unabashed about having certain agendas in my work.
4) I know you make a point of showcase a lot of different bodies in your erotica – your characters don’t default to “able-bodied and thin”, for example, and you make sure your readers know it. With that in mind, when a character ends up being white or fat, fem/me or cis or disabled (or whatever cluster of identities a given character may have), how much of those intersecting privileges and oppressions are just “how the character showed up in my head” versus how much of it is an active decision on your part as an author about the kind of story you want to tell?
Much of the time, not defaulting takes conscious work. Sometimes I catch myself not having defined some aspects of a character’s identity and there I am, stuck in my usual defaults. I usually am stuck by the things I haven’t defined, a little ways in, not knowing where to go. Conscious work gets me unstuck, and a lot of the time that is at least partly about establishing specificities of identity.
Some aspects of a character’s identity will come to me with the character’s voice or the situation or the conflict I’m imagining at the beginning of the process. Sometimes those choices are driven by the way I puzzle out what I can bring to a specific call, how I can imagine bringing these people together.
One of the things that has become very clear to me is how much the specificities of identity of my characters are often shaped by my own identities and needs. When I think about the specifics of the queer genders that appear in this collection, it is clear that I’ve mostly been writing stories about my own gender experiences, or about genders that I have fantasized about being. Over the past 15 years of writing erotica, the body of work from which I drew the stories for this collection does not include the diversity of genders of the people in my life and my communities. Instead, my deep hunger for putting myself into a genre where I have mostly been erased or misrepresented has driven many of my choices about the genders of my characters. As a whole collection, those choices contribute to a deep erasure that mirrors the ways trans misogyny and misogyny often operate in queer communities. For me, this recognition is even more reason to work more on consciously considering the identities of my characters.
When I was pulling stories together for the collection, from the body of my existing work, one of the things I worked on was more clearly marking the identities of the characters, so that they weren’t just clear to me, but were clear to the reader. So the reader also was less likely to go to defaults while reading. I needed to do this much more with my earlier work than with my later work.
A few years ago I began a project of deliberately centering disabled characters in my work, one that coincided with my decision to live more deeply into my own disabilities. I wanted my creative work to hold the same intentions as my personal work, so they could feed each other. I have found writing these stories to be so powerful in my own life. Many of them are included in this collection; they are the ones written in the third person.
5) On a related note, you tell stories from a lot of different perspectives – both from story to story and sometimes within a single piece. Can you talk about the factors that determine whose PoV you’re writing from, which stories are going to involve “head hopping” versus which ones stay with a single narrator? I’m thinking, in particular, of stories like “My Precious Whore” where you’re dealing with some fairly heavy edges (for the characters but also for, um, me as a reader…) but also of “The Tender, Sweet, Young Thing” where the narration is bouncing between half a dozen heads. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Most of my early work was in the first person, though I played with that some by having POV characters sometimes imagine that they knew the perspective of other people (like in “Nervous Boy”). My recent work has been in third person. It was a conscious choice to shift that way, because I found it unblocked me. Until I tried third person, I kept hitting up against a wall, couldn’t figure out how to more clearly mark characters as disabled.
When I chose to shift my work, I embraced head hopping, something that is often frowned upon in erotica circles. I wanted to explore multiple interior experiences, see where that got me. In “The Tender Sweet Young Thing”, I wanted to stick with three perspectives—to stay inside the heads of the three queers that were central to plotting the fantasy scene, because they each were deeply invested in creating this scene from a different place. Dax, from a fantasy ze had held since childhood, Mikey partly as a gift of love and recognition for Dax, and partly for her own self, and Téo, who recognized a gender he wanted to play with. The story shifts from one to the other as the dynamics shift between the characters, that’s how it flowed out, so by the time you get to the actual scene, you hopefully have a stake in each of them getting what they need from it, and from each other.
With first person, often a voice comes to me as a story sparks. Point of view is one of the first things that solidifies in the story. In “My Precious Whore”, I was working on a few things in that story:
1. I was working to illuminate the edges inherent in playing with misogyny and whorephobia, to take the reader deep enough to really be able to see how deeply dangerous this kind of play is.
2. I was trying to illustrate how a structure of D/s and consciously chosen power play can create a container for this sort of intense and risky psychological edge play, make it possible to do it.
3. I wanted to capture something specific about orgasm control, how it can work in humiliation play scenes, how helplessness from forced orgasms can be particularly intense and beautiful.
4. I wanted to write a story that explored possessive top desire that wasn’t feral (which I’d mostly been writing), but went to colder places, wielded power differently, grappled with the edges of misogyny and deep psychological play.
5. I was attempting to illuminate the ways being the top in a scene centered on humiliation, objectification, and play with oppression can be incredibly edgy for the top and how the top can need support from the bottom.
Some of those things would be a good match for the bottom’s point of view, especially #3. (I want to write another story from a bottom’s point of view that can get me there more deeply.) #1 and #2 could work from either point of view. But for #4 and #5 I needed the top’s perspective to get me there.
I put that story in a drawer for a while after I wrote it. It felt too volatile to put out into the world, and too personally edgy. That’s how it has often worked for me with the stories that go deep into play with misogyny. (“Strong” is another example.) I was concerned about the damage they might do in the world, and worried about the ways they could be misinterpreted. This version of “My Precious Whore” illuminates top vulnerability much more than earlier versions, and it showcases the support of the bottom. Telling it from the top’s perspective really helps it get there, helps the reader touch those things.
6) In “The Ballad of Tam and Jan” (and I love that Carter Hall turns up in more than one story, by the way), you talk about transformative experiences for tops. In it, and also stories like “My Pretty Boy”, you talk about tops needing to remember and honour their own needs. There’s this pervasive (or maybe it’s just me?) thing where sadistic, and even just toppy, desires are framed as not okay – like it’s totally fine to want to be anonymously skull-fucked by a truck-load of random people, but wanting to turn someone into “just a hole” (to pick a theme that ran through a lot of your stories), to dehumanize them, is less okay. Wanting to beat someone to a pulp because it feels good to hit defenseless people is, well, monstrous. I find in a lot of Kink 101 stuff, the top is framed as facilitating the bottom’s experience, with the bottom being “really in charge” and the top being a provider in a lot of ways. Can you talk about that stuff in the context of the needs and vulnerabilities of tops?
The fear of top desires and needs that you describe is one of the most frustrating aspects of kink culture for me. I’ve written several essays about it. It’s a big problem, and can make navigating play so much harder for everyone, so much less likely to be mutual. This image of the top as facilitating the bottom’s experience and having no needs of their own is a huge contributing factor to ableism in kink communities. It’s been a challenge for me, personally, to find play partners that are up for considering and honoring my needs as a top, especially my needs for support around pushing my own edges.
My work, and in particular the stories in this book, are invested in creating different images of tops, different narratives about what tops need and desire, what bottoms do to support tops, what play that is mutual and honors the needs and desires of all parties can be like. Stories help create culture, and this book is one of the ways I’m trying to shift the way we think about top desires, top needs, and top vulnerabilities.
These stories openly celebrate sadistic and dominant desire, and that aspect of them alone is likely to make people uncomfortable. I’ve had stories rejected (with rather intense judgmental language) for openly describing sadistic desire. Once I had an editor suggest that I edit the story so that the dominant was not so clearly getting off on making the submissive cry during sex, because that felt inherently non-consensual. The editor suggested that I change the story so that the dominant was doing it to facilitate the experience the submissive needed.
In these stories, I am attempting to carve out room for the beauty and heat of unapologetically sadistic desire, and it is partly to meet my own needs. I need a kink culture that honors sadists who have their own desires, that supports tops to be vulnerable, that asks bottoms to support tops in play, that honors that everyone has needs. Not just because I’m human, but particularly as a disabled top.
7) Tell me something you love about this collection and want everybody to know.
I’ve talked about writing stories that center disabled and sick characters, how that was my project over the last few years. These stories often include disabled and chronically ill fat trans and genderqueer characters playing with each other, in community with each other, creating accessible spaces together. I’ve never read stories like that before, which is one of the reasons I needed to write them.
What I haven’t talked about is how impossible it has been to place these stories in anthologies. I’ve been aching to share these stories with the world, but have had no luck getting them published. I finally decided that I had to try to sell them as a group with my other work, in a collection like this, in order to get them printed.
Before I could seriously tackle that project, Go Deeper Press approached me to request a manuscript. They love these stories in particular, which makes me incredibly glad. And now these stories are out in the world, and I am so thrilled that people get to read them! I love that my first collection shows some of my oldest work, next to the new directions I’ve been going in as a writer.
Thank you, Xan. 🙂
~*~
You can pick up a copy of Show Yourself to Me from Go Deeper Press (print or digital), or as a e-book from Amazon.
You can find Xan’s thoughts about the praxis of sex, kink, queerness, power, and writing at xanwest.wordpress.com.
Hey.
So, y’all are about to get cross-posted to death, so please bear with me on this one.
I just had a lovely chat/consult with life-coach and fellow Woo Person, Sofia Wren, talking about energy blocks, life goals, and Pulling It All Together.
What I said to her was that – to boil down my rambling into something a little more coherent – I have my fingers in a lot of pies, and I want to keep doing all of them… but I also feel a little scattered and a lot like I don’t have a clue what I’m doing… And what I’m looking for is, basically, way to reframe my million scattered elements so that I can see how they all dovetail and fold together and slot into place to form a cohesive whole (AKA: My Career).
Something that was really neat to see her picking up on was that, when I think about “My Career”, even when I do imagine actually make some sort of reliable annual income from it, what I’m thinking of isn’t “money”, it’s “connection”. I don’t want to be a writer like Stephen King or a performer like Madonna. I want to be like Cat Valente and Holly Black. I want to be like s00j and Heather Dale.
My two big take-aways from my wee, free (thank you!) introductory coaching session were:
1) Clean out your heart and your throat (and I get a little bit of pressure in my throat when I write that, so hey) chakras, ‘cause your passions are right in there[1].
AND
2) Integrate sex-as-nature and body-as-nature and food-as-nature. This was a really neat observation/piece-of-advice which, combined with the above observation about connection, led me to the idea of career-as-ecosystem, both in the sense of (a) an ecosystem is thrives when it has a lot of variety in it (no monocultures for me!), and (b) I don’t want to be in competition with other people doing the similar things to me; I don’t want to be taking food out of Lee and Andrea’s mouths if ever I wind up on a lecture circuit about polyamoury and consensual-power-dynamics (just as a for-instance). I want to be part of an ecosystem that is thriving.
That’s what I’ve got to work with, while I’m working on the novel, the locavore cook-book/memoire, the D/s-related essays, the chapbooks, the jewelry, the Making Of Things, the keeping of my house, the search for my Forever Home and its Garden, and all the zillion other little things I have on the go at any (every) given time.
I was lucky and got to have one of her free coaching sessions, which is wonderful. I happen to think she’s awesome, and I found the session helpful and also encouraging, so I’m passing her services along to all of you. Do go and have a look at what she offers both as a coach and on her blog.
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
[1] I am not surprised by this. Dammit, it really is all about the singing, isn’t it? Also, as a PS, when I did the above-linked throat-chakra-clearing meditation, I felt my mouth fill up with steam. What does that mean? Thoughts? Beuler? Anyone? It was an interesting side-effect, for sure.
NOTE: For other throat-clearing / chakra-clearing exercises try here, here, here, and here.
Hey folks!
So I’ll be heading to Unholy Harvest this year (first time outside of my own city, no less) and am excited about a number of things – singing (zomg I haven’t performed an opera piece in something close to a decade!) at the Talent Show, attending the Flow workshop, seeing the Extended Leather Phamily for Thanksgiving Dinner, and reading some of my porn at the open mic.
It’s that last one with-which I’m concerned today.
I write erotica. I used to write erotica all the damn time – to the point where I was actually worried that I wasn’t able to write anything else, or that maybe I was defaulting to sex scenes because they were becoming a habit rather than because it was something I actually wanted/needed to put on paper right then.
These days, it comes far less often.
Alas.
Because I’d like to get it back.
I wrote a piece – “Wolf and Scarlet” – to submit to an anthology. I didn’t get in (which is not actually horrible – it still means that a writer whom I respect a lot actually read my stuff, and that’s kind of a big deal for me), but I’m really proud of it. I’m looking forward to reading it aloud to my community, though I’m going to have to make sure it doesn’t take more than eight minutes to read which… seeing as it takes about twenty minutes to read (I just checked) is not likely to work out.
Cripes. 3500 words, or so… If I can read 175 words-aloud in one minute… I basically need a story that’s about 1200 words long.
Hrmph.
I’m not sure how I’m going to fix that…
Back to the drawing board with me!
Cheers,
Ms Syren.
So. You may recall my post about black-out day on the internet and how I griped about not being able to do a damn thing other than spread the word.
Well, it turns out there’s more than one nasty act in the running, and ACTA (or read the wiki here) is looking like it might be even worse.
Michael Geist talks about what you can do if you’re in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., or the E.U. here, and provides a bit of a discussion on what the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has to say about it here.
As it happens, the Department of Foreign Affairs is conducting an open consultation on ACTA and you, fellow Canadian citizen and/or resident, can email your thoughts and concerns to them at consultations [at] international [dot] gc [dot] ca
Below is the letter I wrote and sent to them, if you’re looking for something to use as a template:
~*~
Good afternoon,
I’m writing to you about Recommendation #3 in the report on CETA and ACTA (from the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage):
“The Committee calls on the Government of Canada to ensure that domestic copyright policies are not part of any present or future trade negotiations; that Canada’s commitments to the implementation of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) are limited to the agreement’s focus on combating international counterfeiting and commercial piracy efforts; and that the Government of Canada retains the right to maintain domestic copyright policies that have been developed within the framework of its commitments to the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Berne Convention.”
I’m relieved to see this recommendation being made. As an independent artist who relies on word of mouth (which, these days, means social media) to promote my work, I worry that CETA, ACTA will have a very negative impact on the livelihoods and freedoms of expression of my fellow writers and performers, as well as Canadians in general.
As an individual Canadian citizen, and an emerging Canadian artists and arts promoter, I agree that the copyright provisions should be removed from CETA and from any future trade agreements. I also agree that Canada should push to limit ACTA’s implimentation to combating internation counterfeiting and commercial piracy efforts as, without that limitation, I fear that the provisions of the Agreement could be used by unscrupulous governments (now or in future) to silence and censor their citizens. Lastly, I appreciate Canada’s unique copyright laws, so I’m glad to see the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage calling for the Government of Canada to retain the right to maintain our domestic copyright policies as they were developed within the context of WIPO and the Berne Convention.
Thank you for listening, for conducting the open consultation on ACTA, and taking the thoughts of Canadians into consideration on this subject.
Sincerely,
etc.
~*~
I vote that we deluge them with letters. Go forth and write!
So. January 18th, 2012. Blackout Day on the Internet.
Basically, because of SOPA and PIPA threatening to wipe out free speech on the internet, a bunch of websites, big and small, have locked their contents for the day and left a note for their readers/users/contributors/etc explaining why.
No, actually, I’m not being hyperbolic about this. Watch this video for details (the last minute of the video is probably most important in relation to this post):
I support this black-out. It’s meant to show people – people who might otherwise not pay attention to something about Hollywood – what the internet could end up looking like if these laws get passed.
However, I’m also in Canada and thus, like everyone else outside of the U.S. (who none the less uses U.S.-based (either by owner or by ISP) websites), I’m pretty-much stuck.
Their vaguely-worded, heavy-consequence-bearing would-be laws would screw the rest of us, too, but we don’t have a political voice (or perhaps a political ear?) to harass their congress into stopping it.
See… Here’s the thing. In theory, this is about the entertainment industry having cart blanche to shut down any website (entire site – as in all of WordPress, not just one blog) they’ve decided is violating copyright laws in some way (like, say, someone posts a video of themselves recreating a Lady Gaga video in their livingroom). But it has the potential to be grossly abused both in the U.S. and as a model for laws passed elsewhere[1].
This is why people are so (rightly) up in arms about this. And this is why, if you live in the U.S., the rest of us would really appreciate it if you’d get on the phone (or the email, or the twitter feed, or the snail mail, or all of the above) to your congress-person/senator and tell them in no uncertain terms that you do NOT support these laws and don’t want to see them pushed through. Americancensorship.org even has a handy pre-fab letter you can send in directly (hey) via the internet.
Go forth and save us all.
Thank you, (no, really, THANK YOU),
Ms Syren
[1] Like here, not to put too fine a point on it.
Hey, my dears,
This is just a quick, self-promotional fly-by posting directing you to the following:
Naughty and Nice: An XXXmas Story in Three Parts – Part One
Naughty and Nice: An XXXmas Story in Three Parts – Part Two
Naughty and Nice: An XXXmas Story in Three Parts – Part Three
Dyke porn includes tit-slapping, age play, a trans femme, a cis butch, a really big dildo, a three-way, and Santa Clause. What’s not to love? 😀
TTFN,
Ms Syren. 😀
Red
Out of the darkness
they come in
sky-high heels and
thigh-high boots and
sneakers with the toes
kicked out
of shelters they know
too well
they make tracks like
rose petals
lipstick kisses
blisters and blood spatter
clatter of red
shoes clicking
scuffing down lonely
stretches of highway
through labyrinth industrial
parks and darkened streets
They come in
packs
have each others’ backs
as they did in life
sister, brother, wife
they circle with smiles
like knife
gashes eye
lashes like piano wire and
teeth like broken bones
they are coming
home
our dead sisters,
brothers, wives,
red shoes click-clacking
scuffing on pavement
graves bent open
and silences
broken
red throated
they will name you
red handed
and red clawed
they will claim you
and brand you
complicit
complacent
murderers
If you drown
in their red blood
it will have been
too long in
coming
December 17th is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
If you’re in Ottawa this Saturday, go to Parliament Hill at 2pm. Look for the red umbrellas. We’ll see you there.
I wrote this two years ago, in memory of the women who died in the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre in Montreal, today in 1989.
Fourteen Reasons
because they wouldn’t fade
into the background
because they knew the risks
of living
in a man’s world
because they were brave and
risked them anyway
because they wouldn’t
let
the boys win
because they were smart
and capable
and knew it
because they didn’t want arts degrees
or secretarial certificates
but wanted this
because they went after
what they wanted
and got it
because they were in the wrong place
at the wrong time
because they were exactly where they belonged
because they were
a bunch of feminists
even the ones
who wouldn’t have said as much
because they were just like you
just
like me
because they were
always ever and only
themselves
because they are remembered
and so many others aren’t
because
at the root of it
they died
because they were
girls
December 6th - Take Action on Violence Against Women!
Sit at my feet
beloved and cherished
the way you smile
up at me
is sunlight
beaming through winter’s chill
your warmth seeping into me
like tea
made just the way I like it
come and rest your head upon my knee
beloved and cherished
come and rest
your head upon my knee
syrens 