Sinister Wisdom 90: Catch, Quench

By Sinister Wisdom

Let Sinister Wisdom 90: Catch, Quench catch you and quench your love of lesbian literature and culture! Catch, Quench explores the complexity of lesbians through stories on love, family, and conflict to conjure up your hunger for more—and satisfaction.

Special Features:
• Speculative Fiction by Susan Levinkind
• Memoir by Ellen Orleans
• Poetry by Diane Solis, Cara Armstrong, and Tara Shea Burke
• Tribute to Catherine Nicholson, founding editor and publisher of Sinister Wisdom

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Feb 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944981006

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

Book preview

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Notes for a Magazine

Diane Solis

Thirsting

Fuchsia and the Fists

Susan Levinkind

How My Mother Swam to Mars

Tina Minkowitz

lilith is

Michele Patrizi

Bird Watching

Ellen Orleans

SCOUR

Sam Samson

Where You Go

Arthur

Cara Armstrong

the fifteenth letter

angels by the pink radiator

blue nights

Amber Carpenter

Fall from Grace

Sheree Mack

Figurehead

Warming Her Side of the Bed

Tegan Grant

Technically Speaking

Allegra Perhaes

Body Work Magic

E. Manning-Pogé

The Woman You Need

sunday afternoon

Tara Shea Burke

The Harness

The Hungry Girls of America

First Touch

Three Unsent Postcards

Barbara Haas

Why This Blood and Not That?

Alexandria Kapczynski

Secret Garden

Sipping from Your Lips

Tribute to Catherine Nicholson

Harriet Desmoines

Catherine the Lionhearted

Beth Hodges

Catherine Nicholson (1922–2013), Formidable Founder of Sinister Wisdom

Susan Robinson (formerly Wood-Thompson)

Catherine As I Knew Her

Marilyn Frye

Remembering Catherine Nicholson: artist, intellectual, culture critic, lesbian, feminist, dyke community member, and wild woman

Book Reviews

Contributors

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NOTES FOR A MAGAZINE

Catch, Quench. Catch you off guard, catch you off balance, c atch you from a fall. Catch your mind, capture your heart, trap your imagination. Catch, then quench. Quench your thirst. Catch your unspoken dreams, quench your deepest desires . Catch, quench. As I selected the material for this issue of Sinister Wisdom those two words rolled around in my mind. The material in Sinister Wisdom 90: Catch, Quench will catch you; it will demand your attention for reading; it will quench your desire for lesbian literature and culture. Remembering the words of Harriet Desmoines and Catherine Nicholson from the first issue of Sinister Wisdom , We need MORE to read on, to feed on, more writing to satisfy our greedy maws, Sinister Wisdom 90: Catch, Quench gives you more to read on and feed on, more to catch and quench your greedy maws. Let Sinister Wisdom catch your imagination, quench your thirst, slake your womanly desires.

While compiling and editing this issue of Sinister Wisdom, I had the good fortune to travel and meet with a number of Sinister Wisdom subscribers, contributors, supporters, and volunteers. Sinister Wisdom 34 cover dyke, Dolphin, proudly showed me her cover, tacked to her wall, before we toured her marvelous garden; she let me glimpse the love shack out back, and I’ll commit here to my desire to return and stay there a few days. I spent a wonderful afternoon with Sinister Wisdom business manager and contributor Susan Levinkind. Susan is one of the important forces of nature behind Sinister Wisdom; she keeps our books, manages our subscriptions, and generally ensures that things run smoothly here at the journal. Her partner, Sinister Wisdom editor emerita, Elana Dykewomon, was extraordinarily generous with her time and attention during my travels. I am grateful to her for that, and more so I have gratitude every day for the work she did to shape Sinister Wisdom into what the lesbian literary institution is today. Photographic contributors Lynda Koolish and Jean Weisinger welcomed me into their home for a lovely afternoon of feminist fellowship and visual bedazzlement. Contributor and longtime reader Roberta Arnold delighted me one morning with her keen mind and probing questions, and supporter and subscriber Sara Warner regaled me with stories over dinner. I appreciate the kindness and hospitality of all of these great womyn during my travels for both pleasure and research. Maybe I will meet you next in my travels?

A note about the business of publishing Sinister Wisdom: with this issue we have raised subscription prices. It has been a long time since the cover price and the subscription prices of Sinister Wisdom increased. With increased costs of paper, printing, and especially postage, increasing our cover price and subscription rates was a necessity. Sinister Wisdom remains committed being available to lesbians, however. We continue to offer a sliding scale for subscriptions with hardship subscription rates between $10 and $25. Sinister Wisdom also continues to provide free subscriptions to women in prison and mental institutions.

Sinister Wisdom can continue only through the generosity of subscribers and supporters. No one at Sinister Wisdom receives payment for her time, energy, and creative contributions to the journal. Thank you for supporting Sinister Wisdom, for catching lesbian-feminism, for catching our desire for a new and transformed world, for quenching our thirst for change. Sinister Wisdom is a labor of love for all of us. Like this issue, Sinister Wisdom catches our hearts and our minds; it quenches our thirst, filling our greedy maws.

In sisterhood,

Julie R. Enszer, PhD

Fall 2013

THIRSTING

Diane Solis

Twilight shadows poured

steaming into night’s thickness

where my paintings bore

the collected tint and debris

of all the years beneath the waves

and all the days until I finally

moved out there painting

while storms in sheets

deluged the metal roof,

painting the smells and sounds

with rain pouring down

into the dense dark earth

painting the thirst and ache

I palpated at her core

and all those blue fire tongues

glistening, unquenched

even in all that rain.

FUCHSIA AND THE FISTS

Diane Solis

When I was alone, making the rounds, the nights were punctuated by sounds. I called her Fuchsia, because she could be flamboyant, and because she liked to kiss me outside before I left. She called me her Sweetie. We were two women under the stars with the neighbors watching. I saw over her shoulder their silhouettes behind the sheer curtains of their second story bedrooms. She always punctuated the last kiss with a soft pucker-pop in the darkness, like the sound of wet sand releasing something, or softer still, the way fuchsias kiss the air, snapped open by the plump carrot-fingers of children who don’t mean any harm.

There were terrifying sounds too. That couple screaming at each other through the walls, waking me with a start in the middle of the night. How my heart seized while they fought, at the slaps, at the fists hitting flesh while their bodies pummeled the wall by my head. All that cursing, crying and cursing, not easing or stopping until one of them took off with a door slamming. The car pulled out and raced away, spitting gravel as it screamed onto the highway. One stayed behind, weeping through the wall into the darkness, into my room, into me.

HOW MY MOTHER SWAM TO MARS

Susan Levinkind

My mother was a strong swimmer and proud of it. In the 1950s when women were supposed to be happy housewives, my mother was a teacher and a strong and able car driver, who rejected women driver jokes. My dad had never learned to drive, growing up poor in Pittsburgh and always living in big cities. He got his driver’s license when I was in first grade. But he didn’t drive much; my mother and dad had only one car. He worked in New York City taking the Long Island Railroad, walking to it from our house and, at the other end, to his office.

One Wednesday in August of 1952, when I was ten and Miles, my brother, five, Mother took us to Jones Beach, as she often did. We saw other folks screaming and jumping up and down when the waves came in, but Mother swam beyond the waves. I am going to swim and you kids better not go anywhere near the water. I am putting your blanket back up here and I want you to stay right by it or you’ll be sorry. Miles and I exchanged a glance. We knew that disobeying meant no supper and Mother throwing pots and silverware at us, so although it was hot and we wanted to go in the water, we didn’t dare.

We had pails and shovels and built sandcastles anxiously watching for her return. We never imagined she would drown, but her mean and unpredictable ways caused us to imagine her abandoning us.

When she swam away we hardly noticed at first, immersed in our sandcastles. But when it got colder and darker, I got worried about where she was and what would happen to us. Miles was whimpering, so I took my brother’s hand and went to find a policeman. I told him, My mother swam away and hasn’t returned to us for hours.

Miles was crying, Where is our mother? The policeman asked, Where is your father? I gave him my dad’s work number in the City.

While we waited, the cop bought us hamburgers, fries, and sodas. My brother got real excited about the fries, which my mother would never have bought for us.